
CHARLES CAVERN 0 D.D. 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap.. Copyright No. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE TEN WORDS 

A Study of the Commandments 



BY 

REV. CHARLES CAVERNO, A.M., LL.D. 

Author of " A Treatise o?t Divorce" " A iVarrow Ax in Bibli- 
cal Criticism" and " Chalk Lines Over Morals" 



Mutabo pro causa 



BOSTON 

Ube pilgrim press 

CHICAGO 




43669 

Copyright, 1899 
By Chaeles Cavebno 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 



2« Y&$ 



" Writing has this terrible disadvantage, which 
puts it on the same footing with painting. The 
artist's productions stand before you as if they 
were alive ; but if you ask them anything they 
keep a solemn silence. Just so with written dis- 
course. You would fancy it full of the thoughts 
it speaks; but if you ask it something that you 
want to know, about what is said, it looks at you 
always with the same one sign. And, once com- 
mitted to writing, discourse is tossed about every- 
where indiscriminately among those who under- 
stand and those to whom it is naught ; and can- 
not select fit audience from the unfit. And 
when maltreated and unjustly abused, it always 
needs its father to help it; for it has no power 
to help or defend itself." — Plato, "Phaedo." 

Martineau, Tr. 



3 



PKEFACE 



Whoever reads these pages will see that 
the "Higher Criticism" has had very little in- 
fluence over their composition. 

The intent of the Lawgiver in the command- 
ments, the treatment they received by the peo- 
ple Israel, their enlargement and vitalizing by 
the^ prophets, their spiritualization— " fulfil- 
ment " — by Christ, their application to indi- 
viduals and society in modern conditions must 
have place in the thought of any expositor. 

I have not made, in the treatment given to 
each of the commandments, strict and orderly 
development of these ruling ideas, but have 
made now one and now another prominent as 
the facts seemed to warrant and the case to de- 
mand. Seeming discrepancies in what I have 
written I think may be reconciled by seeking 
the points of view from which I was looking 
on the matters under consideration. I think 
those points may, usually, be found easily. 

'"Whoever attempts exposition of the com- 
mandments will find himself on a very wide 
sea. I do not think my work exhaustive. It 
only shows how my own mind runs on the 

5 



6 PREFACE 

problems presented. Other writers will find 
room to construct other schemes and give other 
elaboration. For example — a friend, whose 
judgment I value, who has looked over these 
pages, writes : 

"I do not think that you have the real gist 
of the Third Commandment ! To my notion 
its prohibition of profanity and perjury and 
the idle or irreverent use of God's name are 
merely incidents. It is true that they are for- 
bidden by it; but the main intention of the 
commandment, as I believe, is prohibition of 
hypocrisy. The children of Israel were to be 
known as the Lord's peculiar people, They 
were to carry his name with them wherever 
they went (Num. 6: 27). The Third Com- 
mandment enjoins that they should not take 
God's name upon them in any vain, meaningless 
way, but with the full intention of being faithful 
to it. They were not to profess that they were 
his people and then by the worship of idols or 
by the commission of unworthy deeds bring 
dishonor on the name of the Lord their God. 
That, I think, is the germ, and in the New 
Testament its development is the being faith- 
ful to the Christian ideal, after having made 
confession of Christ before men. This view of 
the Third Commandment you have not put 
forth at all, and indeed it seems almost uni- 



PREFACE 



7 



versally to have escaped the commentators. I 
believe in my heart, however, that it is the 
right one." 

Nevertheless, I think what I have said is le- 
gitimate and finds a place under the Saviour's 
" fulfilling " comments. But this instance shows 
how wide is the possibility to one who thinks 
or writes on these themes. 

I welcome others to the joy they will have 
in similar work, as I have had in mine. I trust 
my readers will kindly remember the motto 
on the title page, " I will change for cause" 

In preparing these pages for the press and 
in the oversight of their issue, I have had from 
M. C. Hazard, ph. d., such assistance as only 
an acute critic and faithful friend can give. 

C. Caversto. 

Lombard, 

Du Page Co., Illinois, 1899. 



CONTENTS 



The First Commandment 
The Second Commandment 
The Third Commandment 
The Fourth Commandment 
The Fifth Commandment 
The Sixth Commandment . 
The Seventh Commandment 
The Eighth Commandment 
The Ninth Commandment 
The Tenth Commandment . 



9 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 



That God, which ever lives and loves, 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event 

To which the whole creation moves, 

— Tennyson, In Memoriam. 



12 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 



"Thou shalt have none other gods before me." — Ex. 20: 3; 
Deut. 5:7. 

The ten commandments are the germ of 
what we have acquired in religion and morals. 
But germs are very crude affairs. You cannot 
see the blossom and the fruit of the full-grown 
tree in an apple seed. Germs are low devel- 
opments in the scale of life, and belong to an 
order of things so primal that you often cannot 
tell from a germ what is to develop from it. 
There may be within or over it a directing 
power that will cause the germ in its growth 
to take on some determinate form and charac- 
ter of class or species. But all this is unseen 
in the germ. Like all other germs the Ten 
Commandments had life in themselves and they 
grew until, under them, for us, is grouped a 
body of thought very different from that which 
entered into the conception of the Hebrew 
people. 

It would be a very interesting study to com- 
pare what we mean by the Ten Commandments 
with what the children of Israel meant, and 

13 



L4 



THE TEX WORDS 



then to compare both with the content of 
meaning which Moses, the lawgiver, had in his 
mind concerning them. For it is evident 
enough that, on some things, Moses meant 
much, of which his contemporaries among the 
children of Israel had no conception. It is al- 
ways so. The pioneer in morals and religion 
will always have in view much that those 
about him cannot take in — much which only 
later generations will grasp. But the problem 
would grow too intricate and subtle if we were 
to enter into strict psychological analysis and 
make formal distribution of the elements we 
find. 

Something like the following will be a sim- 
ple form of inquiry, and will yet give our fac- 
ulties a brisk gymnastic : What did those to 
whom the commandments were given see or 
put into them, and what do we see or put into 
them ? What did they originally cover ? 
What have they come to cover in the realm of 
religion ? Or, What was the germ and to 
what has it grown ? 

There can be but little doubt that, as the 
First Commandment came to the children of 
Israel in the wilderness, they took it to mean 
that now they were to have a tribal or na- 
tional God. That is what Israel meant by Je- 
hovah for generations, for centuries. The facts 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 15 

of Israel's history show the interpretation 
given by the people to this commandment. 
Nor does Moses in giving it seem to have had 
any other idea than just to drop it in on the 
level of the mental comprehension of the peo- 
ple. " I am Jehovah, thou shalt have no more 
gods than me," is a fair summary and inter- 
pretation of the commandment as given in 
Exodus. We do not get ahead of that in the 
second summary of the law — the book of Deu- 
teronomy. There, indeed, we hear Closes (or 
whoever was the author) say : " Hear, O Is- 
rael : Jehovah our God is one Jehovah." But 
the force of that is evident. Its intent is to 
prevent the people from breaking up their god 
into several individuals, to cut them off from 
the possibility of becoming poly theists on their 
own national base. 

The question of absolute monotheism does 
not seem to have been raised by the com- 
mandment at all, or by any comment of 
Moses upon it. You hear him in Deuter- 
onomy, after this attempt at making them 
monotheistic, speaking thus : " Thou shalt 
fear Jehovah thy God; and him shalt thou 
serve. . . . Ye shall not go after other gods, 
of the gods of the peoples which are round 
about you." The implication is (and Israel al- 
ways acted on this implication to a late stage 



16 



THE TEN WORDS 



in his history) that, as Israel had his god, so 
other nations might have their gods. The ex- 
istence of such gods was not denied, or, if it 
was denied, the denial cut no figure in Israel's 
thought. He took Jehovah as his god and 
left the other nations to have their gods as he 
had his own. 

Now that is as far as the commandment 
went with the generation to which it was 
given and with many succeeding generations. 
Israel looked out upon the god or gods of other 
nations ; if he regarded them as inferior to his 
own god, Jehovah, it was because of his na- 
tional pride, because he meant to be the su- 
perior nation and make his god dominant over 
theirs. But he had no thought of denying the 
existence of the gods of other nations. AYhat 
he did mean was that Jehovah should beat 
them in the race for supremacy. In the dark 
days of the national fortunes the people often 
gave up Jehovah and worshiped the gods of 
the nations who vanquished them in war. 
Then the judge or the prophet or the reformer 
arose and brought back the people to the wor- 
ship of Jehovah by arousing the national in- 
stinct, by an appeal to Israel not to confound 
itself with other nations, but to come back to 
its own god and so assert the national life once 
more. With Israel, as with all early peoples, a 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 11 



god was a national constitution. He was a 
military ensign, a banner, a pennant, under 
which the nation went to war and asserted 
the right to its national existence. You may 
see this plainly enough in that first attempt of 
Israel in the wilderness to get a god of his 
own. With reference to the making of the 
golden calf you read thus : 

w And when the people saw that Moses de= 
laved to come down from the mount, the peo- 
ple gathered themselves together unto Aaron, 
and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which 
shall go before us ; for as for this Closes, the 
man that brought us up out of the land of 
Egypt, we know not what is become of him " 
(Ex. 32 : 1). 

AVhen the calf was made and set before 
them they greeted it with a cry which, showed 
how much military significance a god had 
with them. " These be thy gods, O Israel, 
which brought thee up out of the land of 
Egypt." Now they had a national constitu- 
tion and a military ensign, and both were in 
the god they had adopted. "With enemies be- 
fore and enemies behind they must have a 
battle-crv and a god to fight for them. Manv 
a nation has begun with that simple beginning 
— the name of a god, a common battle-cry 
that stood for their history and for their am- 



18 



THE TEX WORDS 



bitions. It was the germ of their " manifest 
destiny." 

A thought by the way. These idolatrous 
Israelites were not such mere imitators as they 
are sometimes supposed to be. In their very 
wrong they showed an independence, which, 
when it is attached to the right object, will 
guarantee a people a national life and history. 
It is said that in making a calf they were im- 
itators of the idolatry of Egypt out of which 
they came. lS"o, they rather exhibited a wide 
departure from the Egyptian idolatry. The 
Egyptians worshiped living animals or their 
mummied remains. The calf cast in the wil- 
derness is said to be a reminiscence of the bull 
Apis. But Apis was a living animal. Israel 
as an idolater is above the degradation of 
prostrating himself to a beast. He has no na- 
tional god ; his leader has gone into the wil- 
derness and makes a long stay ; he does not 
know what has become of him ; the military 
situation is exigent, but he does not turn back 
for a god to the live beast his oppressors wor- 
shiped. He makes his symbol in the form of 
an ox, it is true ; but it is of gold and made out 
of the most cherished jewels of the people. 
Xo ; idolatrous Israel in the wilderness is no 
copyist. There is, even about that bad busi- 
ness, a strain of individuality which has been 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 19 

seen in the Hebrew from that day to this. 
Moses and the prophets will set that individu- 
ality in better forms, will give it higher con- 
ceptions, till, grasping the idea of monotheism, 
it shall set the fashion for the religion of man. 

If you want to see what need this command- 
ment was intended to supply and what it meant 
to Israel you must observe the use he made of 
it. There is one capital case which will illus- 
trate the thought of which we are in pursuit : 
Some generations later than this time, after 
Israel was in possession of the promised land, 
there was war between him and the Philis- 
tines. It was at the close of the priesthood 
and judgeship of Eli, and just before the found- 
ing of the Hebrew monarchy. We can do no 
better than to read directly from the record : 

" The elders of Israel said, Wherefore hath 
Jehovah smitten us to-day before the Philis- 
tines ? Let us fetch the ark of the covenant 
of Jehovah out of Shiloh unto us, and save us 
out of the hand of our enemies. So the 
people sent to Shiloh, and they brought from 
thence the ark of the covenant of Jehovah of 
hosts, which sitteth upon the cherubim; and 
the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, 
were there with the ark of the covenant of 
God. And when the ark of the covenant of 
Jehovah came into the camp, all Israel shouted 



20 



THE TEN WORDS 



with a great shout, so that the earth rang 
again. And when the Philistines heard the 
noise of the shout, they said, What meaneth 
the noise of this great shout in the camp 
of the Hebrews ? And they understood that 
the ark of Jehovah was come into the camp. 
And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, 
God is come into the camp. And they said, 
Woe unto us ! for there hath not been such a 
thing heretofore " (1 Sam. 4 : 3-7). 

A case like that scarcely requires comment. 
It shows Israel as not yet beyond the concep- 
tion of Jehovah as a national god, under 
whom, as an ensign, he fought in battle. The 
Israelites sent for the ark of the covenant be- 
cause they expected thus to make Jehovah 
help out in the battle of his own people. The 
plan came near succeeding in the enthusiasm 
it inspired in Israel. But it seems to have put 
a corresponding desperation into the Philis- 
tines and they were victorious. The Philis- 
tines seem to have felt that they had up-hill 
work, for Dagon was at home in Ashdod and 
they had to fight Israel and his god with no 
god at hand to oppose to Israel's Jehovah. 
The Israelites do not seem to have had any 
higher order of thought respecting their god 
than the Philistines had respecting theirs. 

But when the Israelites got a god they be- 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 21 



came a nation. It was this feeling of the ne- 
cessity of having a god for national purposes 
that prompted the action of Israel in the 
wilderness, while Moses was on a long ab- 
sence, receiving the commandments from the 
Infinite Spirit with whom he seems to have 
had assured communication, Moses' wrath 
with Israel for its action was founded on other- 
considerations than opposition to this out- 
working of a national instinct. Christ said 
that Moses left some matters of legislation 
where he did because of the hardness of the 
heart of the people. This First Command- 
ment in its simple denial to Israel of all gods 
but one, bears witness, that, on things theistic, 
Moses had to be content to deal as he could 
with the blindness of mind of the people. 
He gave them their national god and waited 
for time to develop the right conception of 
that god's relation to the universe and its 
government. Do not imagine that the Bible 
was all written up as far as the twentieth 
chapter of Exodus, and that the children of 
Israel had it in their hands when they stood 
before Sinai to receive the law. They had 
nothing of it. They probably had in their 
heads nothing that we read before the twen- 
tieth chapter of Exodus except some family 
stories — the folk-lore with regard to ancestral 



22 



THE TEX WORDS 



history, which goes down, and goes so accur- 
ately clown, the generations, when the art of 
writing is unknown or is not a common 
possession. There is nothing to indicate that 
the children of Israel, as a nation, had such 
ideas as we find in the first chapter of Gene= 
sis. Moses may have had such ideas, may 
have written the first chapter of Genesis, but 
the people Israel did not take them up for 
ages nor did thev connect such thoughts with 
the First Commandment. It was the work of 
the psalmists of later days to sing such con- 
ceptions into the popular mind. Such thoughts 
came to the people from the poet and his song. 
This First Commandment did not give them 
the idea of Jehovah as the Creator. That 
came subsequently as some poet sang, " For 
Jehovah is a great God, and a great King 
above all gods. In his hand are the deep 
places of the earth, the heights of the moun- 
tains are his also. The sea is his, and he 
made it ; and his hands formed the dry land." 
It was the prophets, who felt their way along 
the lines of the everlasting righteousness, who 
put the God Jehovah on the throne of the 
universe. 

It was in the midst of a people still poly- 
theistic in thought and tendency — a people 
recognizing a multitude of gods as presiding 



THE FIRST C03I3IAXD3IEXT 



23 



over the destinies of the nations, and at times 
still longing to appropriate those gods to 
themselves, that Isaiah pronounced his mas- 
terly philippics (pardon the anachronism and 
metethnism) against polytheism and idolatry, 
Here is theism, pure and simple, exalted to the 
throne of the universe. " "Who hath measured 
the waters in the hollow of his hand, and 
meted out heaven with the span, and compre- 
hended the dust of the earth in a measure, and 
weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills 
in a balance ? "Who hath directed the spirit of 
Jehovah, or being his counselor hath taught 
him? . . . Behold, the nations are as a 
drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small 
dust of the balance : behold, he taketh up the 
isles as a very little thing. . . . All the 
nations are as nothing before him ; they are 
counted to him less than nothing, and vanity. 
To whom then will ye liken God ? or what 
likeness will ye compare unto him ? The 
graven image, a workman melted it, and the 
goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and 
casteth for it silver chains. He that is too 
impoverished for such an oblation chooseth a 
tree that will not rot ; he seeketh unto him a 
cunning workman to set up a graven image, 
that shall not be moved. Have ye not known ? 
have ye not heard ? hath it not been told you 



THE TEX WORDS 



from the beginning ? have ye not understood 
from the foundations of the earth ? It is he 
that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the 
inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers ; that 
stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and 
spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in. . . . 
To whom then will ye liken me, that I should 
be equal to him ? saith the Holy One, Lift up 
your eyes on high, and see who hath created 
these, that bringeth out their host by number : 
he calieth them all by name; by the great- 
ness of his might, and for that he is strong in 
power, not one is lacking " (Is. 40 : 12-26). 

Ah, there is something clear ! But it was 
uttered as late as when the fortunes of Israel 
were ripening for the Captivity, to a people 
even then hesitant, or indifferent to its truth. 
TTe may be very sure that such ideas had no 
place in the minds of that primitive people 
who stood trembling when the thunders were 
playing about Mount Sinai. 

There is one thing that looks very much as 
if they did have such conceptions, or a chance 
to get them, at least, We read in the Fourth 
Commandment, "Eenieniber the sabbath day 
. . . for in six days Jehovah made heaven 
and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, 
and rested the seventh day." That looks as 
if they had received this broad notion of God 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 



in that commandment and had carried it 
through all their history. 

But observe : in the fifth chapter of Deuter- 
onomy the commandments are rehearsed and 
the reason annexed to the Fourth is not that 
the Sabbath day is to be kept because God 
rested on a Sabbath from the labors of crea- 
tion but that the people, remembering that 
they were slaves in Egypt, may give a day of 
rest to manservant and maidservant as well 
as to themselves, Xow the commandment 
must have been given in one way or the other, 
or both or neither ; and the decided probability 
is that the latter is the real way. The proba- 
bility is that the commandments, as originally 
engraved on stone, stood in the very shortest 
form of " Thou shalt " and " Thou shalt not," 
without any reasons attached to any of them. 
The annexed reasons are quite certainly of 
later date, as in all probability the first chap- 
ter of Genesis is of later date than the giving 
of the law on Sinai. 

Tou have this fact to account for, that the 
Israelites throughout history down to the very 
eve of the Babylonish captivity did not act, as 
a people, as though they had a conception of 
their God such as would come from the reason 
annexed to the Fourth Commandment as it is 
recorded in Exodus. But they did act — even 



26 



THE TEX WORDS 



the majority of the kings acted — as though 
they had the conception of Jehovah as simply 
their national god. The enlarged idea Tras 
the idea of the seer and the bard — voices cry- 
ing in the wilderness, through Israel's long 
history. But the seer and the bard came and 
did their work and we have entered into the 
fruit of their labors. 

God cares for germs. It is a part of his 
husbandry to see that they are developed to 
maturity. What Christ said with regard to 
his spiritual life in the soul of man, " Every 
branch that beareth fruit, he cleanseth it, that 
it may bear more fruit," is a general principle 
of God's care over all spiritual truth, or over 
any crude germ out of which spiritual truth 
may come or to which it can attach itself. 
Life began on the globe, doubtless, in micro- 
scopic — submicroscopic — spores. You cannot 
see in them the bloom of the peach nor taste 
in them the delicacy of the pineapple. But 
beauty in bloom and lusciousness in taste are 
here at the end of the ages. God has presided 
over processes by which they have been educed. 
And God has been in the process as well as in 
the composition of the original spore. 

So God was with the bard and the seer who 
took the crude germ — the tribal god Jehovah 
— slightly distinguishable, so far as we can 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 



27 



see, from the tribal Dagon or Baal, and lifted 
it up higher and higher until the god that 
dwelt between the cherubim on the cover of 
an ark of gopher wood looked down upon the 
whole earth from his throne in the heavens ; 
until the god who was a mere symbol of na- 
tionality, a standard round which to rally 
in battle, became " The high and lofty One 
that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is 
Holy." 

Side by side with the intellectual exaltation 
of the idea of the Deity came also a moral re- 
finement, till the battle god of the Hebrew 
nomad became, with the singer and the prophet, 
" a God loving righteousness and hating in- 
iquity," a God not looking after simply the 
temporal weal of the nation, but a God look- 
ing in upon the souls of men, commanding " to 
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk hum- 
bly with " him. The war-cry against the alien 
and the stranger ceases, the battle array is set 
no more against the foreigner but against the 
foe within, against the moral corruption which 
saps and mines the strength .of a nation. It is 
the voice of one who sees God marshaling 
moral forces that cries, "Behold, the day 
cometh, it burnetii as a furnace ; and all the 
proud, and all that work wickedness, shall be 
stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn 



THE TEX WORDS 



theni up, saith Jehovah of hosts, that it shall 
leave them neither root nor branch. But unto 
you that fear my name shall the sun of right- 
eousness arise with healing in his wings " 
(Mai. 4 : 1, 2). 

AVhat if the voice of prophecy did die out 
for generations in Israel ? That warning and 
that promise were still ringing in men's ears 
till John the Baptist came — a prophet reen- 
forcing the teachings of the prophets, crying, 
"Eepent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at 
hand." 

One way in which God cares for a germ is 
by putting it in proper accompanying condi- 
tions, giving it proper soil, moisture and air— - 
a proper matrix to develop its qualities. This 
commandment has come in the end to put a 
God of righteousness and love on the throne 
of the universe, not so much from any inher- 
ent vi^or in itself as from the force which it 

o » 

acquired from the accompanying command- 
ments. Jehovah might have remained a 
brother of Dagon for all the influence he 
would have had over us, had it not been for 
accompanying definitions which directed the 
growth and thought and feeling about him till 
he came to fill the heavens and the earth with 
his power, with his truth and goodness. But 
that is ground which we must leave for subse- 



THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 



29 



quent development as we shall treat of the 
other commandments. 

We can now see from what we came in 
the human conception of God. We can see 
equally well to what we have come in the 
growth of thought and in the clarifying of 
spiritual perception. 

If I repeat this commandment, " Thou shalt 
have no other gods before me," we at once put 
into it the idea that we are to prefer nothing 
to God as we understand him ; that we are to 
seek and to follow his will no matter what be- 
tide. And we are right in spiritualizing what 
was once so crudely material. We are in har- 
mony with the whole process of God from the 
thunder of Sinai to the last still, small voice 
pleading for the new, the better, the upper life 
in the soul of man. Along the whole line prog- 
ress has been made by the spiritualizing proc- 
ess. Let the commandment come with the 
spiritual suggestions we have of it. They are 
a part of the natural growth, inseparable as 
bloom and fruit from the radicle in the dark- 
ness below. 

We have seen that the psalmist and prophet 
put new signification into the commandment. 
But there was One who put more life into it 
than they all — One who had only to speak 
and, in his own language, the words he spake 



30 



THE TEN WORDS 



became "spirit and life." The weapons of 
Scripture with which the Saviour conquered 
the temptations to which he was subjected in 
the wilderness were all quotations from the 
book of Deuteronomy. The last quotation 
was a paraphrase of this First Commandment, 
taken from a little further on in the book, be- 
yond the place of the commandments : " Thou 
shalt worship Jehovah thy God, and him only 
shalt thou serve.' 5 That, as the Saviour used 
it, is simply the First Commandment looking 
no more upon the gods of the heathen round 
about, but looking within a soul to the 
thoughts and intents of the heart. There is 
ethnic suggestion in the text in Deuteronomy ; 
in Matthew the suggestion is ethical. There 
everything is to be subordinate to the desire 
of the loving and righteous God. Jesus took 
this old First Commandment and made it 
the moral guardian of every function of the 
human soul. His great work in the practical 
reconciliations of men with God was done 
with spiritualized conceptions of this com- 
mandment. " Seek ye first his kingdom, 
and his righteousness," is but the First Com- 
mandment as the Saviour viewed it. That is 
the germ come to full, ripe, spiritual fruit. 
When the Saviour summed up the whole of 
the commandments of God into two, in his 



THE FIRST COJIJIAXmiEST 31 

first commandment, "Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all 
thy soul, and with all thy mind," he was 
simply repeating the First Commandment of 
Moses and " fulfilling " it — putting into it all 
the wealth of his spiritual conception. So 
what was first in order in the Mosaic code 
has become, under God's nurture, first in rank 
among the spiritual principles of the kingdom 
of God. If we take the First Commandment 
into the heart, as it is lighted up by Christ, we 
can with it destroy sin, and bring about the 
kingdom of heaven. 

The psalmist, speaking of Israel's fortunes, 
said : " Thou brought est a vine out of Egypt : 
thou didst drive out the nations, and plantedst 
it. Thou preparedest room before it, and it 
took deep root, and filled the land." In some 
such way, under the care of God, has this com= 
mandment grown. The tribal god of wander- 
ing Israel has become the God of the universe 
and fills the spiritual heavens. The end in 
view of religion is that this God have in all 
souls the moral and spiritual supremacy and 
direct and inspire the thoughts and intents of 
the heart ! 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 



A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns 
And the round ocean and the living air 
And the blue sky and in the mind of man : 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. 

—Wordsworth, Tintern Alley. 



34 



THE SECOXD COMITAXDMEXT 



" Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor the 
likeness of any form that is in heaven above, or that is in the 
earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou 
shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them : for I 
the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the 
fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth 
generation of them that hate me ; and showing mercy unto 
thousands, of them that love me and keep my commandments." 
— Ex. 20: 4-6; Deut. 5 : 8-10. 

Bexax, the Frenchman, who wrote a life of 
Jesus — better, perhaps, who wrote the life of 
a French Jesus — has also written a treatise on 
the religions of the Semitic nations. His 
opinion is that there was a monotheistic in- 
stinct in the Semitic family, i. e., that there 
was a tendency in the blood of that race to 
worship but one God. This affects the re- 
ligion of the Old Testament, and, ultimately, 
for that matter, of the New, in this wise : it 
destroys any marked distinction between the 
religion of the Hebrews and that of their, 
kindred races, so far as adherence and alle- 
giance to one God is concerned. "Were the 
Jews monotheistic, says Kenan, so were other 
Semitic nations. They each had their peculiar 
national god. Jehovah stands no better in 

35 



36 



TEE TEX WORDS 



the forum of our modern criticism than Xis- 
roch, the god of the Xinevites, or Baal, the 
god of the Phoenicians. 

There is some truth in Kenan's position. 
The Semitic nations seem not to have had 
originally the tendency to multiply deities 
which characterized the old tribes and na- 
tions of our Indo-European stock, or which 
marked the old primitive Turanian peoples 
with which both Semite and Aryan came in 
contact. It was a large family of gods that 
dwelt on Olympus, with an indefinite multitude 
of inferior deities outlying. The statues of 
the gods in the Pantheon testified to a tolerance, 
in the Roman mind, for the notion of the multi- 
plicity of deities. The Hindoos, according to 
Monier Williams, have 330,000,000 gods. 

Our Scriptures show the truth of part of 
Eenan's case. The Philistines, if we allow 
them to be Semites, though such admission 
is questionable, had their god Dagon. The 
Moabites had their god Chemosh. The Mo- 
abite stone, discovered within a generation, 
discloses the name of this Chemosh as the 
single god of the Moabites. Eenan's theory 
will not hold, however, if he insists upon the 
parallelism between the history of the mono- 
theism of the Hebrews and that of their re- 
lated nations. The germs may have seemed 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 37 

the same, but, in the process of differentiation, 
the development was not the same in the two 
cases. In almost all cases it can be shown 
that these other nations took to polytheism in 
their later history by associating new gods with 
their own primitive deity. The Phoenicians 
associated Ashtaroth with Baal. The Philis- 
tines seem to have associated the same female 
deity with their god Dagon. When Sennach- 
erib, the king of Assyria, came up to demand 
the surrender of Jerusalem he tried to make 
Hezekiah an object of ridicule to the Jews be- 
cause he was compelling them to serve only 
one god. In Chronicles we read : " Thus saith 
Sennacherib king of Assyria, Whereon do ye 
trust, that ye abide the siege in Jerusalem ? 
Doth not Hezekiah persuade you, to give you 
over to die by famine and by thirst, saying, 
The Lord our God shall deliver us out of the 
hand of the king of Assyria ? Hath not the 
same Hezekiah taken away his high places 
and his altars, and commanded Judah and Je- 
rusalem, saying, Ye shall worship before one 
altar, and upon it shall ye burn incense ? " 
(2 Chron. 32 : 10-12). The high places were re- 
sorts for idolatrous worship. There was some- 
thing that told the Hebrews that their God 
was a " jealous God." So they, when they wor- 
shiped other gods, practically ceased to worship 



38 



THE TEN WORDS 



Jehovah. To associate any one with him was 
usually clean revolt against him. With the 
prophets it was high treason. Though the 
mass of the Hebrew people might have felt 
that their God was only their national god, 
who was engaged in a conflict with the god or 
gods of the nations against whom they strove, 
there is abundant evidence to show that the 
leaders of the Hebrew religion, Abraham, 
Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, had the strict monotheis- 
tic idea and did not allow that the gods whom 
the other nations worshiped were living beings 
at all. " Of a truth, Lord," says Hezekiah, 
" the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the 
countries, and their lands, and have cast their 
gods into the fire : for they were no gods, but 
the work of men's hands, wood and stone ; 
therefore they have destroyed them. ISTow 
therefore, O Lord our God, save us from his 
hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may 
know that thou art the Lord, even thou only " 
(Is. 37: 18-20). The Hebrew prophets re- 
garded their God not as a god of the Hebrews 
only but as the God of the universe. The 
burden of the prophets was not that Je- 
hovah was the special guardian^ god of the 
Hebrews, but that the Hebrews were special 
guardians of the idea of the unity of the Su- 
preme Power in Jehovah. The very name by 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 39 



which the Hebrew God was called, Jehovah — 
One Who Is — shows that it was meant to as- 
sert that a God was worshiped who existed 
as against one who did not. 

But however true Kenan's views as to the 
Semitic monotheism may be in part, there is 
one feature which marks the Hebrew as a reli- 
gion that cannot be classified at all with those 
of kindred Semitic nations. It is the feature 
disclosed by this Second Commandment. The 
worship of Jehovah was not idolatrous. Idol- 
atry marked every other Semitic religion as it 
did every Indo-European. Considered in all 
its relations and bearings this Second Com- 
mandment is one of the most remarkable 
things in the religious history of mankind. 
Just what other religions have done has been 
to exhaust art in the attempt to give expres- 
sion to the form of their deities. The execu- 
tion of that sort of work had with them a re- 
ligious character. But it was sin against 
Jehovah for the Israelites to make a golden 
image to represent him. The religion that 
prevailed in Israel did not follow the type of 
that experiment made in the absence of Moses. 
The idolatrous tendency was overborne. The 
Egyptians called all the power of their civi- 
lization to provide magnificent temples as 
abodes, while they lived, for the beasts or 



40 



THE TEN WORDS 



reptiles which they treated as gods, or to pre- 
serve their mummies when dead. But some- 
thing different from that came out of the 
wilderness of Sinai. 

Whence came this conception, a conception 
to which time has added nothing, that God 
can be represented by no form? Whence 
sprang such an idea ? The people had not the 
intellectual culture to develop it of themselves. 
Intellectual culture was all with, if not the 
people, yet the priest of the land they had left. 
If the idea was not people-sprung, how came 
the lawgiver and the prophet by it ? It was 
not an idea that lay brooding in the human 
mind just ready to come to the surface all over 
mankind, the Israelite being the first by a few 
years or generations to bring it forth. The 
idea is one that civilized humanity has not 
reached practically, except as it has been taken 
from the lawgiver of Israel and his representa- 
tive, the prophet. In their thoughts lay the 
germ that is taking possession of all mind. 
More than 1,200 years after this command- 
ment was given by Moses to the Israelites, 
Pompey, then the foremost man of all the 
Roman world, conquered Jerusalem, entered 
the temple and went personally into the Holy 
of holies. Tacitus has thought worthy to 
record that it was the standing astonish- 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 41 



ment of Pompey and the Romans that he 
found in that sacred place " no image and no 
shrine." Twelve hundred years after Moses, 
the foremost Roman general could not con- 
ceive of a religion without an image of its 
god. You recollect how it was at Athens a 
hundred years later. It was new doctrine even 
to that news-hungering and thirsting people, 
when Paul stood before their splendid temples 
— the homes of the statues of their gods — and 
declared to them the infinite, omnipotent, in- 
visible, unrepresentable Deity. " The God 
that made the world and all things therein, he, 
being Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not 
in temples made with hands. . . . We 
ought not to think that the Godhead is like 
unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and 
device of man" (Acts 17: 24, 29). That was 
simple reiteration of the message that some- 
how got to the Israelites from out the rugged 
crags of Sinai thirteen hundred years before. 
It came now as a message to a people whose 
enlightenment had not saved them from idola- 
try, but had led them into it so far that the 
statues of their gods were said to equal the 
number of their men. 

The Greeks started out for their career in 
civilization about the time that the Israelite 
took up his march for the Holy Land. Each 



4 2 



TEE TEN WORDS 



people had perfected its fruit, But Paul's 
speech in Athens disclosed to the Athenian 
that the whole religious cultus of his people 
for the whole thirteen hundred years had been 
on a false basis in a most vital point, and that 
he must go back and begin with the lawgiver 
of the escaped Semite slaves in the wilderness 
of Sinai. The speech of Paul was the chal- 
lenge of Mount Sinai to the Acropolis, and the 
theology and philosophy of modern civilization 
has ranged itself with Mount Sinai. 

I assume the " Ten TVords " to be of the 
date of the exodus, no matter what the date 
of the Levitical law in whole or in part may 
be. That assumption laid down, if I were 
asked what is the great miracle of the Old 
Testament, I should answer, The Second Com- 
mandment. Take it all in all, considering the 
time when it was announced, the darkness that 
lay upon the nations, the people to whom it 
was announced, the influence it has had over 
men, the Second Commandment is the stu- 
pendous marvel of pre-Christian history. The 
First Commandment standing alone would 
never have given us monotheism. The Second 
Commandment insured that result. It was a 
perpetual challenge to thought. It kept the 
horizon clear so that thought could expand. 
Eeason could not be satisfied about such a 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 



43 



commandment until it saw that its meaning 
was — one God, and that God transcending the N 
universe. 

K"or has modern theology or philosophy 
added anything to this commandment. There 
it stands as it has stood during all the ages in 
its simple yet majestic and comprehensive 
truth. This commandment is an indication of 
most pronounced character, not only that the 
worthies of the Old Testament — the lawgiver 
and the prophet — meant to worship no little 
god of their own people, but the great Ruling 
Power over all things, but that these worthies 
met with that God, and, as it is said in Peter's 
letter, were borne onward in their thought 
under the inspiration of his Spirit. 

Consider how far we have pushed out mod- 
ern science. How infinite in magnitude, and 
infinite in detail of arrangement, is this uni- 
verse ! What kind of a being must be its 
Maker and Governor ? How thoroughly ap- 
parent, in the light of science, is it, that the 
mind and power behind and in this universe 
cannot be adequately imaged by anything that 
is in the heavens above or in the earth beneath 
or in the waters under the earth. And yet the 
conditions of our thought with reference to the 
Creator, which modern science compels us to 
assume, are all met by this old commandment 



44 



THE TEN WORDS 



of 3,000 years standing. The charge is 
brought against the thought of the Old Tes- 
tament that it is always anthropomorphic. 
This commandment is absolute refutation of 
that charge in the sense in which it is laid, to 
wit, that everything is of man-form and man- 
measure. It is fairly out of the toils of that 
sort of anthropomorphism ; it is larger than 
" the measure of a man." Is it not the more 
rational account of such a commandment to 
say that God gave it ? The people Israel might 
have got a tribal god, but they would never 
have evolved the notion of his unrepresenta- 
bility. That came from above them. 

Time has not attacked the validity of the 
conception this commandment denotes. Down 
here in this age we want an unrepresentable 
God of the universe, do we not ? Well, what 
we want is covered by language written on 
Sinai in a dim age of man's thought. Think 
of such comprehension at that time and ask 
whence it came. Realize that, vast as is the 
conception of the universe now disclosed to 
view, a word of the wilderness of the wander- 
ing Hebrew has brought to us an idea of its 
Maker and Founder not beneath the appropri- 
ate dignity. There is but one satisfactory 
judgment to be applied to the case. Some one 
caught the truth of the Supreme Intelligence 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 



45 



by communion therewith. "Neither in this 
mountain, not in Jerusalem, shall ye worship 
the Father: . . . God is spirit, and they 
that worship him must worship in spirit and 
truth ; " 1 is Christ's " fulfilment " of the Second 
Commandment. 

This commandment goes not only against 
the act of making a material image of God, 
but also, in its essence, it runs against conceiving 
of God under forms of whatever nature. Ma- 
terially we may have ceased to be image mak- 
ers ; conceptually we may still be idolaters. 
We need to cast out our mental images or men- 
tal idols of God as well as those physical. This 
may be difficult to do ; and it may be asked 
what we are to do with children, who always 
have some mental form for the Creator though 
they never saw a representation of him of any 
sort. Well, let children have their provisional 
ideas here as well as elsewhere. " When I was 
a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I 
thought as a child : now that I am become a 
man, I have put away childish things." This 
is not the only place where we are called upon 
to modify the provisional conceptions of child- 
hood. The mental idols which we fashion of 
the Deity are greatly in the way, with many 
minds, of a rational understanding of some 

1 John 4: 24 (r. v. margin). And so in other similar cases. 



46 



THE TEX WORDS 



other important Christian truths. TTe must 
get idols not only off from altars but out of 
our minds. In reference to this point I call 
attention to a criticism of Channing on Milton:" 
"Milton is not the first Christian who has 
thought to render the Supreme Being more in- 
teresting by giving him human shape. TTe 
doubt the wisdom of this expedient. To spir- 
itualize our conceptions of him seems to us the 
true process for strengthening our intimacy 
with him ; for in this way only can we think 
of him as immediately present to our minds. 
As far as we give him a material form we 
must assign to him a place ; and that place will 
almost necessarily be a distant one. and thus 
we shall remove him from the soul, which is 
his true temple. Besides, a definite form clashes 
with God's infinity, which is his supreme dis- 
tinction, and on no account to be obscured ; 
for. strange as it may seem to those who know 
not their own nature, this incomprehensible 
attribute is that which above all things consti- 
tutes the correspondence or adaptation, if we 
may so speak, of God to the human mind." 
Channing further says : " God is spirit, and they 
that worship him must worship in spirit and in 
truth. It is of great importance to the prog- 
ress and elevation of the religious principle 
that we should refine more and more our con- 



THE SECOXD COMMANDMENT 



47 



ceptions of God, that we should separate from 
him all material properties. We should regard 
him as pure intelligence, an unmixed and in- 
finite mind. When it pleased God to select 
the Jewish people, and place them under mi- 
raculous interpositions, one of the first precepts 
given them was, that they should not repre- 
sent God under any bodily form, any graven 
image or the likeness of any creature. We are 
to approach him under no bodily form, but as 
pure spirit — the infinite and universal mind." 

It would not be worth while to notice the 
crude anthropomorphism which insists that 
God has form because it is said that Adam 
was made in his image, were it not that that 
anthropomorphism, coupled with another cru- 
dity, to wit, that Christ having human form 
was thus representative of the Divine existence-, 
probably lies at the basis of one of the most 
vexed controversies of theology. Charles 
Kingsley says that Arianism arose because the 
Arian limited and defined Deity and then all 
he could say was, o/ioto> — like. The notion of 
emergence therefrom of that which is identical 
with limitless Deity became impossible. Thus 
the idea of manifestation was lost. John ex- 
pressly denotes the manifestation of Deity made 
in Christ by terms of life, mind, spirit. If John 
is the author of the Apocalypse, he is consistent 



THE TEN WORDS 



with himself in his pictorial representations. 
Daring as he is in his use of the brush upon 
the stage scenery " round about the throne," 
he has forborne any sketch of its occupant. 

Errors are often adumbrations of truth. 
Pantheism contains a soul of truth that we 
want to use. Baldly, pantheism makes the 
universe God. In so doing it does one thing 
that we want to do— it makes God coexten- 
sive with the universe, and so of course as un- 
representable as the universe in its entirety. 
If one can use pantheism as a crutch on which 
to hobble out of his narrow conceptions of the 
Deity as limited to form and so to place, he 
may do well. If instead of making " the all " 
God, he will conceive of God as the thought 
and power everywhere present in the universe, 
managing " the all," in part and whole, he 
will have a conception which both modern 
science and the Second Commandment unite in 
forcing upon him. So he will reach the idea 
of the immanent God which both religion and 
science are now striving to compass. It must 
be, as we have found Channing to say, that 
the conceptions we have as to the Divine Be- 
ing will have important bearing upon our 
spirituality. If we are clearly convinced that 
God is everywhere, we may get the notion, 
which we ought to have, that the reason why 



THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 49 

we do not apprehend him better is because 
we are not enough like him, have not moral 
kinship enough with him to detect him. Not 
by the impact of sense but by the divineness 
of our being can we touch God. No eye hath 
seen and no eye can discern God. That vision 
is reserved for purity of heart. Goodness is 
the great detective and revealer of the pres- 
ence of the Divine Spirit. Righteousness knows 
its home and rests in the bosom of God. 

There are few truths of the Christian faith 
which do not receive illumination and helpful 
exposition from the point of view we here oc= 
cupy. The inspiration of the Scriptures seems 
no longer a thing of wondrous miracle, but 
the natural thing, the thing that we should 
expect. Why should not holy men of God of 
old time, or of any time, speak, "moved by the 
Holy Ghost " ? There have been men whose 
hearts lay alongside the Divine heart wher- 
ever they were. Their souls were fit to be 
interpenetrated by the Divine Spirit. Thej r 
breathed the same spiritual atmosphere with 
the Eternal Spirit. They owned God and God 
owned them. He and they had many things in 
common. Why should they not, then, speaking 
out of the depths of their own being, speak out 
of the depths of the Divine Being as well ? In 
their heart of hearts they were one with him. 



THE TEX WORDS 



They dwelt in the Divine bosom, where his 
truths are kept, and how could they help read- 
ing them ? All this becomes natural under 
the idea that in whatever quarter of the uni- 
verse man may be, God is as personally pres- 
ent there as anywhere ; and that all that is 
needed is for man to become like him in spirit 
to detect the fulness of his power and the in- 
tent of his thought. 

If so much be true something further may 
be true. If only the world were pure in heart 
it might see God. But it is not pure in heart 
and it cannot see. What then ? May not a 
world that is blind still appeal to the compas- 
sion of the Divine heart ? "What if God should 
so love the world that he should give out of 
his inflniteness a conditioned expression of his 
life, thought and feeling, such that even the 
blind eyes of wickedness could not fail to see 
it ? " The Word became flesh, and dwelt 
among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as 
of the only begotten from the Father), full of 
grace and truth." For "the life was mani- 
fested.-' The thought is philosophically ten- 
able ; the thought is ethically tenable. What 
if it be fact ? It would be in harmony with, 
and answer a possible end in view in the pub- 
lication of the great truth covered by the Sec- 
ond Commandment. 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



A word fitly spoken 

Is like apples of gold in baskets of silver. 

—Prov. 25 : 11. 



52 



THE THIED C0MMAXD3IENT 



lt Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain ; 
for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in 
vain. — Ex. 20: 7 ; Deut. 5 : 11. 

The commandments, as we have said, are 
germs. They are the beginnings of the regu- 
lation of human thought and action. They 
indicate lines for moral development, but are 
themselves little more than such indications. 
I The Saviour said that the commandments 
/ were good as far as they went, but that we 
I should not stop on the points located by them, 
but must extend their lines. " I do not come," 
he said, " to destroy the law, but to fill out its 
signification." 

There is in the Third Commandment the be- 
ginning of an attempt to regulate human 
speech. Man has a certain outfit of crude, un- 
defined potencies, and the problem of his de- 
velopment seems to be to put all these poten- 
cies inside certain limits. TThen he has all his 
faculties and propensities under control, he 
has attained the best, the only, conditions of 
his power. The unregulated man is like loose 
waters flowing where they may, doing damage 

53 



54 



THE TEX WORDS 



and becoming themselves turbid. The man 
who has brought his powers under rule is like 
those same waters, accumulated and restrained 
to be poured against machinery to do service- 
able work, or gently flowing in canals, irrigat- 
ing gardens which bring forth bloom and 
fruit. The gift of speech — what a faculty ! It 
is one of the great endowments which help to 
mark man clearly from the animals. The an- 
imals have their cries, but articulate speech is 
something more than an animal cry. If the 
one was developed from the other yet the one 
is not the other. The sum of the increments 
of difference which have come in on speech 
above the primitive animal cry is substantially 
infinite. If they were once one there is now 
practically an impassable gulf between them. 
It might be argued, and I think with truth, 
that the gift of speech and all its outcome are 
the result of the thoughtful control of a crude 
animal cry. But that matter lies in long dis- 
tance behind our text. Therein we meet man 
endowed with speech, and it is from that point 
that we set out. 

We must also assume that in -the purview of 
the Third Commandment Ave have in man a 
moral being, bound to use speech, like all his 
other faculties, in moral modes and for moral 
ends. The Third Commandment seems to be 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



55 



the first moral regulation thrown across the 
unlimited onflow of human speech. Man's 
power of expression would seem to be his own 
to be used by him at his own will. But here 
conies something in the interest of his moral 
development which commands a pause. It 
says : Before you speak here you shall stop 
and think — you shall know what you say and 
why you say it — the intent and the extent of 
your meaning. The commandment does not 
forbid you to take the name of God upon 
your lips. It says you shall not speak his 
name thoughtlessly, idly, vainly. When Moses 
stood before the burning bush it was not said, 
Thou shalt not stand there, but it was said, 
" Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the 
place whereon thou standest is holy ground " 
(Ex. 3 : 5). Speech has its holy ground which 
it must not ruthlessly invade, but upon which 
it must come with careful, subdued and noise= 
less step. 

This commandment was not set up simply 
as a fence to the divine dignity. It was laid 
down as one of the first stepping-stones on the 
way of man's progress upward to nobility of 
speech and character. Into what this germ 
will unfold we can see if we look at the 
Saviour's treatment of it. Let me premise by 
saying that there are various versions of this 



56 



THE TEN WORDS 



commandment or comment upon it scattered 
throughout the law. We read in Leviticus 
19 : 12 : " Ye shall not swear by my name 
falsely, so that thou profane the name of thy 
God/' In Numbers 30: 2: "When a man 
voweth a vow unto the Lord, or sweareth an 
oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not 
break his word ; he shall do according to all 
that proceedeth out of his mouth." In Deu- 
teronomy 23 : 21 : " When thou shalt vow a 
vow unto the Lord thy God, thou shalt not 
be slack to pay it : for the Lord thy God will 
surely require it of thee ; and it would be sin in 
thee. But if thou shalt forbear to vow, it shall 
be no sin in thee. That which is gone out of 
thy lips thou shalt observe and do." These 
are all simply versions of the Third Command- 
ment, and show in what direction its bearings 
were conceived to lie even in the days of Moses. 
But now comes the Saviour as an interpreter : — 
" Again, ye have heard that it was said to 
them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear 
thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine 
oaths : but I say unto you, Swear not at all ; 
neither by the heaven, for it is the throne of 
God ; nor by the earth, for it is the footstool 
of his feet ; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city 
of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear 
by thy head, for thou canst not make one hair 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



57 



white or black. But let your speech be, Yea, 
yea ; Nay, nay : and whatsoever is more than 
these is of 1 evil " (Matt. 5 : 33-37). 

We can see now how matters stood under 
the commandment and its various versions in 
the law. All uncultured people are prone to 
eke out what they regard as scanty wardrobe 
for the truth, with magnificence of assevera- 
tion. The old Hebrew put in pledge every- 
thing he could think of in heaven above or the 
earth beneath to strengthen his statements. 
If he wished to state a fact, he swore it was 
so by his head, by the earth, by heaven. Upon 
all this liberty the commandment dropped just 
one check. It said that when a man put in 
the name of Jehovah, as a voucher for his 
statement, he should redeem his speech. It 
did not say he should not use the name, but, 
if he did use it, he should do some thinking 
beforehand ; at any rate that he should think 
enough about it afterwards to stand by what 
he had said in connection with its utterance. 
The whole stream of swearing else, the com- 
mandment left untouched. It did not even 
cut off swearing by the name of Jehovah. It 
said that name should not be carelessly in- 
voked ; that when it was invoked all oaths 
should be sacredly kept. 

1 R. V. margin. 



58 



THE TEX WO EDS 



That seems a very slight restriction on 
speech, but restriction it was, and as such 
doubtless caused the old Hebrews a great deal 
of trouble. For when it was known the re- 
striction was there, of course every one. bound 
in the direction of strength of asseveration, 
would want to show that his case came within 
permissible limits under the commandment. 
TTliat the Saviour said in regard to the liberty 
"of divorce permitted by the Mosaic code, was 
true in respect to this matter. Moses for the 
hardness of their hearts suffered them to put 
away their wives, but. essentially, the rule was 
not so. In the case in view, Moses did not 
cover the whole ground open even to him. He 
had regard to the moral and intellectual weak- 
ness of an undeveloped and untutored people. 
A tendency to dissipation in all powers marks 
primitive and barbarous man. He takes on 
very easily dissipation in speech ; more easily 
than perhaps in the case of any other power, 
because words cost him less than the means of 
any other sort of dissipation. The Saviour 
usually spoke to an exigency, and we see from 
what he said how lavish men were with their 
oaths in his time. Remember, too. what is 
said about Peter at the time of his denial of 
the Saviour : " Then began he to curse and 
to swear. I know not the man." All this is in 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



59 



keeping with what we find in that same land 
to-day. Travelers tell us that every form of 
oath possible to human thought is used on 
every occasion in the East. 1 

In the East in the chaffering over the pur- 
chase of the simplest commodity you will hear 
oaths in unlimited quantity and strength. But 
such dissipation in speech is not confined to 
that region. It takes a high degree of intel- 
lectual and moral refinement to eradicate it)* 
anywhere. If one recalls the English ballad 
of the man who exchanged work with his wife 
for a day, he will find before him a state of 
affairs that is quite primitive. It is somewhat 
old style for a man to be willing for his wife 
to hold plow all day. Oh, but we see that 

1 1 catch the following from De Amicis' " Constantinople " 
as a specimen of the way in which the Sultan, Abdul Aziz, was 
accustomed to swear : 

"At the first word of expostulation from the minister of 
finance, he would launch the first object that came to his hand 
at the head of his unfortunate excellency, reciting with what 
voice remained to him, the antique formula of the imperial 
oath, < By the God that created the heavens and the earth, by 
the prophet Mahomet, by the seven variations of the Koran, by 
the 124,000 prophets of God, by the soul of my grandfather and 
by the soul of my father; by my sons, and by my sword, bring 
me money or I will plant your head on the top of the highest 
minaret in Stamboul.' " 

Fancy President McKinley speaking in that way to Secretary 
Gage when he wants to raise money ! 



60 



THE TEN WORDS 



frequently. Nevertheless it is a primitive 
sight. Possibly we ate a fish yesterday whose 
species have swum all the seas this side the 
cretaceous epoch ; but, found in modern wa- 
ters, it is yet a representative of ancient life. 
What I wish to say is this : in a ballad which 
represents a man as willing that his wife 
should hold the plow all day you might expect 
something like : 

" He swore by all the leaves on the trees 
And all the stars in heaven, 
That his wife could do more work in a day 
Than he could do in seven." 

Lack of culture would betray itself in all 
that extravagance of statement and lavishness 
of oath. When a man begins to have some 
notions of what is due woman, he will begin 
to have some thoughts for the proprieties of 
speech ; I do not mean for woman's sake, but 
for his own civilization's sake. Ambitions for 
refinement are tethered together, correlated 
with one ?~ other, and where you find one you 
will find r c endency to compass all. Profanity 
is the low barbarism of speech, and indicates a 
barbaric state of mind. 

Doubtless the prime purport of this com- 
mandment was to inculcate reverence for 
God. That it does. But it has something 
else in intent. Simple as it is, there are lines 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



61 



of division in it plainly discernible. In bi- 
ology they tell of synthetic types, i. e., types of 
life which contain within themselves indica- 
tions of possible separation into two or more 
lines. In the animal life of the old Silurian 
seas were types which combined within them- 
selves the characteristics of the fish and the 
reptile. Afterward these two lines are sepa- 
rated, But the fish and the reptile both con- 
verge back on one synthetic type as a common 
ancestry. I have heard the objection made to 
the ten commandments that they enclosed no 
direct inculcation of truthfulness. The objec- 
tion will have this force only ; to remind us of 
the fact that truthfulness, as we conceive of it, 
is, historically speaking, a late-born virtue, 
But the objection has really only this force : 
in a sea where the Potsdam sandstone was 
forming you would not fish for salmon and 
pickerel; if you did it would be in vain. 
Xevertheless some life out of which the sal- 
mon and pickerel will come was there. There 
are two commandments that unmistakably 
point to truthfulness as an end r view — the 
Third, and the 2smth: the latter of which 
reads : " Thou shalt not bear false witness 
against thy neighbor." The one enforces 
truthfulness from Divine considerations — the 
other from human considerations. The Third 



62 



THE TEN WORDS 



Commandment does not simply inculcate rev- 
erence for God, but it plainly indicates that 
that reverence shall be shown by the virtue of 
truthfulness. As we have seen, the other ver- 
sions of the commandment, in the old law it- 
self, clearly bring out the idea that it was 
meant to teach the Hebrew that, when he 
called on the name of Jehovah, he should 
stand by what he said ; i. <?., that he should 
not lie. The Saviour's recitation of the com- 
mandment takes on that form: "Ye have 
heard that it was said to them of old time, 
Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt per- 
form unto the Lord thine oaths." That 
charges the very commandment itself with 
the idea that God wants truthfulness as an 
element of the reverence paid him. In the- 
ology it is said that God is made of his attri- 
butes. And then one after another the attri- 
butes are brought in that we may contemplate 
the whole. God is law, sa}^ the wise. God 
is love, says religion. God is wisdom, say's 
philosophy. God is power and order, says 
science. God is the truth, say all. There is a 
long range of time and a wide reach of event 
between Moses, hiding himself in the moun- 
tains of Sinai to get these commandments, and 
Jesus, sitting at the well in Samaria in the 
open day ; and yet both teachers, at their re- 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 63 

spective historic points, were handling the 
same principles. Truth, says the command- 
ment : thou shalt not invoke Jehovah's name 
unless thou abidest by what it was made to 
cover; thou shalt perform unto Jehovah all 
thine oaths. Truth, says the Saviour : " True 
worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit 
and truth : for such doth the Father seek to be 
his worshipers. God is spirit : and they that 
worship him must worship in spirit and truth " 
(John 4 : 23, 24). There is one of the last re= 
suits of ripened religion. But the germ in the 
commandment leads to this result ; and this 
result comes out of that germ. 

There is an essential untruth lurking under _ 
all profanity. See if that does not come out 
in the Saviour's treatment of the matter. " Ye 
have heard that it was said to them of old 
time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt 
perform unto the Lord thine oaths : but I say 
unto you, Swear not at all. . . . But let 
your speech be, Yea, yea ; Nay, nay : and what- 
soever is more than these is of 1 evil." If a thing 
is, and one have so stated, all surplusage be- 
yond the statement of the fact must be false- 
hood. So if a thing is not, one has stated all 
that can be said when he has said that it is 
not. The most forceful statement is, yea, and 

1 R. V. margin. 



64 



TEE TEN WORDS 



nay, for their respective facts. They exhaust 
the possibilities. Whatever is more than these 
in speech must be a lie, and, as the apostle 
John has said, "no lie is of the truth." In 
fact, logic teaches that the positive is the 
strongest degree of comparison. This is beau- 
tiful, white, good, is the strongest statement 
possible, for it is absolute. Whatsoever in 
speech is more than the plain statement of ex- 
isting fact is of evil. In most cases the ex- 
travagance of profanity is brought in to cover 
up a lie which can easily be detected. The 
bystanders were all the more certain that 
Peter was lying, when he said he was not a 
G-alilfiean, because he began to curse and to 
swear about it. " I know not the man," was a 
strong lie ; Peter made it a weak one by his 
oaths. It can readily be seen how it is that a 
commandment against taking the name of God 
in vain becomes, by the development of moral 
perception and conviction under it, an inspira- 
tion to truthfulness in totality. 

The subject breaks up into a great many 
ramifications. Here comes the question 
whether the oath should be administered in 
courts. Certainly the commandment does not 
run against it. The presumption from the 
commandment and its versions in the Penta- 
teuch is in favor of the administration of the 



TEE THIRD COMMANDMENT 65 

oath. The question is, Does Christ reprobate 
the custom ? The fair construction of Christ's 
language holds it to the case of that extrava- 
gant assertion which men were and are in the 
habit of using in the business or ordinary com- 
munication of life. He would cut all that up 
by the roots in order to get down to sincerity 
and the truth. That is the end he has in view. 
Now when the very use of the oath is with in- 
tent to come to just that end in view I do not 
think that Christ's condemnation falls upon it. 
Think a moment what the oath is as adminis- 
tered in court. It is a prayer. A man, when 
called upon to testify, in solemn terms prom- 
ises to tell the truth, the whole truth and noth- 
ing but the truth, and then invokes the divine 
help to aid him in that effort, " So help me 
God." When one wants to tell the truth it is 
inconceivable that the Saviour should prohibit 
him from asking the divine help. To attempt 
to avoid the use of the word, swear, is childish. 
Swear and affirm are substantially synony- 
mous. The Saviour did not use the word 
swear at all ; that is English. Other terms 
would translate what he said as well as that. 

Most men have regard for ideas arising from 
divine considerations over and above those 
drawn from human considerations, and so the 
oath with its appeal to God for help will have 



66 



THE TEN WORDS 



power beyond any fear of the pains and pen- 
alties of perjury. It is one thing for a man to 
realize that he is standing in the divine court, 
and another, that he is simply standing in a 
human court. Men will run the risk of pun- 
ishment from society, but the unknown ele- 
ments are too vast when they come to think of 
carrying falsehood before the throne of God. 
There they will pause. That great master of 
psychology knew what forces rule in the hu- 
man mind when he wrote : 

" In the corrupted currents of this world 
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice ; but 't is not 

so above ; 

There is no shuffling — there the action lies 
In its true nature ; and we ourselves compelled 
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults 
To give in evidence." 

No, let the oath in court stand. Some men 
may not regard it: most men will. It is 
probably with no mind whatever an entirely 
spent force. 

What I have said on this head I wish to be 
understood as relating pretty closely to busi- 
ness in the courts. The whole jungle of extra- 
curial oath, or affidavit, it would be well to 
dispose of by affirmation, as a man has the 
statutory right to do. Indeed, he has that 
right respecting testimony in the courts. But 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 



67 



Trheii no dignity is observed, cared for or 
thought of, it is profanation of language and 
of the soul of man, to use phraseology express- 
ing the ultimate of human reverence. This is 
one of the places wiiere separation between 
things sacred and secular might well be pushed. 
Eeligion has no great interest at stake in an 
ordinary affidavit, so that it should demand in 
it oath instead of affirmation. And business 
could well be left to take care of itself on 
affirmations. It is curious that there has not 
been a wider revolt, in the interests of reli- 
gion, against the common form of the mass of 
oaths through which we are crowded in business 
life. How^ to deal with the difficulty by gen- 
eral suggestion I do not know, except that I 
think every man should exercise his own dis- 
cretion as to the times when he will be Quaker 
and when he will not. A man ought to pre- 
serve his reverence for God and his own self- 
respect in his adjurations. If those principles 
are trespassed upon by the form of an oath, or 
the circumstances under which it is adminis- 
tered, then let him claim the statutory right to 
affirmation. 

There is one w^ay in which I think religion 
has caused the name of God to be taken in 
vain, and so has been the cause of untruthful- 
ness. I refer to the practice, now^ happily 



68 



THE TEX WORDS 



passing away, of compelling the relation of re- 
ligious experience, either in public religious 
meetings, or as a necessary antecedent to join- 
ing the church. Certain experiences, which, 
even if they were true, were yet of an ab- 
normal order, got the lead in this matter and 
were considered the type to which all others 
must conform. The power of religion was 
thus brought to bear to make souls magnify 
or invent experiences. In this way the name 
of God was taken in vain. He was pledged 
to the truth of a thing that was not. All the 
exaggerations of an Eastern bazaar found ex- 
pression in a prayer-meeting. No class of peo- 
ple have more needed to have brought to their 
minds the Savour's direction : " Let your 
speech be, Tea, yea ; Nay nay : and whatsoever 
is more than these is of 1 evil,' 1 than many well- 
meaning and devoted adherents of religion. 
But I think the Church is earnestly trying to 
check falsehood in this particular. It is com- 
ing back to the common-sense ground of not 
expecting developed experiences from those 
who are beginning experience. The tempta- 
tion to lie is strong and subtle, and the Church 
should be exceedingly careful how it puts a 
premium on it. Let us not cause the name of 
God to be taken in vain in our action in the 

1 R. V. margin. 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 69 



interest of religion. The trouble in the case 
has come from no inherent necessity, but from 
the supposed necessity to relate an experience 
that should correspond to some one else's, in 
modern or ancient times. It ought not to be 
difficult for a man to tell just how far he has 
got in religion, and what he has got ; but, 
even usually, it is. "Lie not one to another." 
To whom was that spoken ? To sinners at 
large ? Nay, nay, to a church. Let us in all 
humility try to bear it in mind. The real sin 
of the ecstasies of a meeting of colored people 
in the South is its untruthfulness. There is 
little or nothing to correspond to the ecstasy 
or to warrant it. The whole demonstration is 
fictitious. 

See how our germ develops, runs out into 
life on every hand ! Truly it was the least of 
all seeds, but it has become a great tree and 
the fowls of heaven lodge in the branches 
thereof. Reverential, truthful speech — true 
to intent and fact ! How much we need train- 
ing in speech — training down to it ! I thought 
I should find in Carlyle — that grand old hater 
of all sham — something on our topic, and turn- 
ing to the index, under " Speech " I find the 
following on one phase of our complex topic : 

" No man in this fashionable London of 
yours speaks a plain word to me. Every man 



70 



THE TEX WORDS 



feels bound to be something more than plain, 
to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His 
poor fraction of sense has to be perked into 
some epigrammatic shape that it may prick into 
me : — perhaps (this is the commonest) to be 
topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I 
may remember it- better. Such grinning in- 
anity is very sad to the soul of man. Human 
faces should not grin on one like masks ; they 
should look on one like faces ! I love honest 
laughter as I do sunlight ; but not dishonest. 
Most kinds of dancing, too, but the St. Vitus 
kind not at all. . . . Insincere speech 
truly is the prime material of insincere action. 
Action hangs as it were dissolved in speech, 
in thought whereof speech is the shadow ; and 
precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of 
speech in a man betokens the kind of action 
you will get from him. Our speech in these 
modern days has become amazing. Johnson 
complained, 'Kobody speaks in earnest, sir, 
there is no serious conversation.' " 

A snatch out of Xenophon puts the prime 
requisite we are after in quaint beauty : 
" Thence he sent by night Democrates the 
Temenite, giving him men, to the mountains, 
where the stragglers said they had seen the fires. 
For he seemed formerly to have spoken truth 
in many such cases, the things which were, as 



THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 71 



being, and the things which were not, as not 
being." Sturdy Democrates ! A truth-teller 
out from a lying race and in a lying age ! We 
are building monuments to men who rose to 
noticeable heights in past ages ; ought we not 
to build one, massive and high, to a man who 
under all circumstances reported " the things 
which were, as being, and the things which 
were not, as not being"? By the way, Cae- 
sar lost a chance for a battle with the Hel- 
vetii, under circumstances favorable to him- 
self, because his scout told : Quod non viderat 
pro viso} 

It is not necessary that speech should be re- 
duced to its lowest terms — to the brevity of 
sign language. But it ought to be under con- 
trol, it ought to be thoughtful, it ought to be 
truthful, it ought to have the most exact adap- 
tation possible to facts. Its highest inspiration 
ought to be to state a Yea, as yea, and a Nay, 
as nay, no more and no less. 

I thought when I read Mr. Lowell's address 
at the Harvard bi-semicentennial celebration 
that I wanted to put it in evidence as an illus- 
tration of development under a spirit of which 
this commandment is a germ. The address 
exhibits what you may call the wealth of 
speech. It is a wide look it takes out over 

1 " What he had not seen as—seen." 



THE TEN WORDS 



history, literature, art, science, education. It 
does not " shower " on you " barbaric pearl 
and gold." Its felicity is that it is truthful. 
The tongue declares just what the eye sees 
and no more. Its Yea is yea, and its Nay is 
nay. It came by its wealth and its beauty 
out of a training in thoughtfulness, in exact 
fitting of term to fact. It verified again Mr. 
Webster's canon that eloquence does not con- 
sist in speech. It showed that it depends upon 
insight, perception, and then upon the most 
rigid adherence to truth in description of what 
is seen, in laying the line and plummet of 
righteousness on every word that offers itself 
for service. Here was a result wrought *out 
by compelling one's self to stop and think 
not only at the name of God but at every 
word as though it were his name. 

Great issues hang upon the use of all our 
faculties and none are greater than those de- 
pending upon the use of the gift of speech. 
One whose utterance was always truth says : 
" I say unto you, that every idle word that 
men shall speak, they shall give account thereof 
in the day of judgment. For by thy words 
thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou 
shalt be condemned." We are throwing the 
shuttles which weave the web of that section of 
our judgment in the use of speech day by day. 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 



" Oh, sweeter than the marriage feast, 
'T is sweeter far to me, 
To walk together to the kirk 
With a goodly company ! — 

" To walk together to the kirk. 
And all together pray, 
While each to his great Father bends — 
Old men. and babes, and loving friends, 
And youths and maidens gay ! " 

— Coleridge, 
The Rime of the Ancient 2£ari ner. 



74 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 



" Remember the sabbath clay, to keep it holy. Six days 
shalt thou labor, and do all thy work : but the seventh day is a 
sabbath unto the Lord thy God : in it thou shalt not do any 
work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor 
thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within 
thy gates : for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the 
sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day : where- 
fore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it." — Ex. 
20 : 8—1 1. 

" Observe the sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord thy 
God commanded thee. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all 
thy work : but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the Lord thy 
God : in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor 
thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor 
thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger 
that is within thy gates ; that thy manservant and thy maid- 
servant may rest as well as thou. And thou shalt remember 
that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord 
thy God brought thee out thence by a mighty hand and by a 
stretched out arm : therefore the Lord thy God commanded 
thee to keep the sabbath day." — Deut. 5 : 12-15. 

If I were called upon to specify the com- 
mandment most betokening divine inspiration 
I might name the Fourth. It looks more like 
the work of a mind outside humanity, looking 
in upon it, and putting in a principle for the 
guidance of men from that outside and more 

75 



76 THE TEN WORDS 

comprehensive point of view, than any other 
in the decalogue. All the other command- 
ments, except perhaps the Second, it seems to 
me, might easily have been indicated by 
human experience and wrought out from 
experience. But the Fourth Commandment 
appears to have an extra-experience origin, 
because it is a non-natural institution. As the 
days go by there is no mark on a seventh to 
indicate that it should not be treated as any 
other day. At the time this commandment 
was given there was no induction from human 
experience that would show its merit either on 
religious or economic lines. It was entirely 
arbitrary. But its arbitrariness is of a sort 
that, conscious within itself of its own wisdom, 
waits patiently for the growth of apprecia- 
tion among men. Inductions of experience 
supported " Thou shalt do no murder," " Thou 
shalt not steal." This commandment, when 
it came, could have found justification from no 
retrospect. It was a forecast. It looked to 
the prospective needs of man. It was not 
the product of reflection on the past. Its 
vision was anticipatory. That fact will make 
us regard the commandment as extraordinary 
in its nature. We are not to look upon this 
commandment as an invention at the time of 
the giving of the decalogue. The rest day 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 



77 



was an existing institution among the Israel- 
ites before they stood at Sinai, and no one 
knows how far back it ran into antiquity. 
You find it treated as a well-known custom 
in the directions concerning the use of the 
manna, which, if the record is allowed to 
stand as it reads, are of date previous to the 
giving of the ten commandments. It is not 
the fact that there was a custom, somehow 
invented, of treating the seventh day as differ- 
ent from others, that is to be regarded as re- 
markable, but what does challenge attention is 
the fact that such custom should be taken up 
and treated as of the last degree of sacredness, 
by putting it in the midst of the most radical 
directions for the worship of God and for the 
government of man ; and the further fact that 
the progress of man seems inwoven with and 
dependent upon the observance of the institu- 
tion. This is the commandment, of all, whose 
influence beforehand you could not predict. 
But it is one to whose wisdom history has 
testified, and to which it is destined to give 
larger testimony as time goes by. 

The commandment as it stood on the tables 
of stone probably was the brief sentence : 
" Eemember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." 
The meaning of the institution was left to be 
defined by comment. There is no one of the 



78 



THE TEN WORDS 



commandments on which there is more of com- 
ment given than upon this. You have com- 
ment in the two forms of the commandment 
as we have them in Exodus and Deuteronomy. 
Who was the commentator ? Why may not 
Moses have left comment as well as the text of 
law ? As the commandments come to us this 
one was more elaborated than any other. The 
testimony seems to be that to this more than 
to any other the divine thought clung. For 
the last thing said to Moses, as the record runs, 
when he was about to go down from the mount 
with the two tables of the law, was a long and 
serious charge concerning this Fourth Com- 
mandment : 

"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 
Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, 
saying, Yerily ye shall keep my sabbaths : for 
it is a sign between me and you throughout 
your generations ; that ye may know that I 
am the Lord which sanctify you. Ye shall 
keep the sabbath therefore ; for it is holy unto 
you : every one that profaneth it shall surely 
be put to death : for whosoever doeth any work 
therein, that soul shall be cut off from among 
his people. Six days shall work be done ; 
but on the seventh day is a sabbath of sol- 
emn rest, holy to the Lord : whosoever doeth 
any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 79 

be put to death. Wherefore the children of 
Israel shall keep the sabbath, to observe the 
sabbath throughout their generations, for a 
perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me 
and the children of Israel forever : for in six 
days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on 
the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed " 
(Ex. 31 : 12-17). 

Then next comes the statement of the giving 
of the two tables. It is as if this Fourth Com- 
mandment were the last burden on the Divine 
mind. Over and over again the subject of the 
observance of the Sabbath comes up in the 
books of Moses. 

The faithful observance of the Sabbath was 
a burden of the prophets. They, indeed, tried 
to show that a mere formal observance was 
not pleasing to the Lord, and that by no scru- 
pulousness in respect to Sabbath ritual could 
the people please God so long as they had 
wrong in their hearts. Yet the Sabbath was 
loved by the prophet. So spiritually minded 
a prophet as Isaiah could write like this con- 
cerning the Sabbath day : " If thou turn away 
thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy 
pleasure on my holy day ; and call the sab- 
bath a delight, and the holy of the Lord, honor- 
able ; and shalt honor it, not doing thine own 
ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor 



90 



THE TEX JVGEDS 



speaking thine own words : then shalt thou 
delight thyself in the Lord ; and I will make 
thee to ride upon the high places of the earth ; 
and I will feed thee with the heritage of Jacob 
thy father : for the mouth of the Lord hath 
spoken it " (Is. 58 : 13. 14). 

The simple commandment to remember the 
rest day was a germ. but. like all germs, packed 
with latent possibilities. It was because it was 
impossible to foresee how great, or even of 
what sort, the blessings might be which would 
or could spring out of this institution that its 
origin strikes one as from a vision above that 
of man. From the primal rude type of verte- 
brate who could tell what forms would come 
in animal life ? Yet the higher forms of life 
with their strength and their beauty did come 
from that rude germ. What is developed is to 
be regarded as predestinated by the Divine 
mind, already even in the germ. It is when 
you look at the lines of outgrowth that you 
become convinced that the germ was purposed. 
Remember the rest day to keep it holy is a 
small germ 3 but great moral and spiritual po- 
tencies are concealed in it. 

Already before it left the hands of the law- 
giver it had divided into two great divisions. 
There are foregleams in the comment by Aloses 
on this commandment of the spiritual synthesis 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 81 

of the Saviour, that religion consists in love to 
God and love to man. The rest day is given, 
according to the comment on the command- 
ment in Exodus, that men may remember their 
relationship to God ; and according to the com- 
ment in Deuteronomy, that men may remem- 
ber their relationship to their brother man. 
In other words, before the commandment was 
finally dismissed from the mind of Moses it 
was felt to be charged with great possibilities 
for the totality of religion. In Exodus the 
commandment in effect says : Thou shalt on 
the Sabbath day turn thy thoughts toward 
God ; in Deuteronomy : Thou shalt think of 
the needs of thy brother man. There is a 
platform on which all the forces of religion 
have been and are to be deployed. Religion has 
been developed just as men have worked out 
from these two principles, germinally held even 
in the table form of commandment : Keep holy 
the rest day. 

But all things become complex in develop- 
ment. What an institution is a modern Sab- 
bath day ! There is no other institution that 
is so firmly fixed with civilized man. You 
think our secular institutions have great in- 
herent power. But the Sabbath will survive 
all changes in secular government. Monarchies 
may change to republics, or the order may be 



82 



THE TEN WORDS 



reversed, but the Sabbath continues through 
all changes. Wars do not, indeed, mind the 
Sabbath, but when wars cease, as they must, 
the Sabbath springs up again in peace, as the 
green grass on battle-trampled fields. 

If the Sabbath is not kept as it should be, it 
is nevertheless not obscured or lost. You read 
of a Parisian or a continental Sunday, but 
however much the tone which you may desire 
may have gone from the Sabbath, it is the 
Sabbath still. During the French Eevolution 
the attempt was made deliberately to over- 
throw the Sabbath. It was made law that 
days should be reckoned by tens instead of by 
sevens. But the law died, and not the Sab- 
bath. What began, as I said, as an arbitrary 
institution, has become so ingrained in the so- 
cial organism that is seems to have the power 
of natural as against human law. That is the 
triumph of power. The germ was very simple 
— a day of rest for man made sacred to God. 
Usually you see separation become more dis- 
tinct where there are various lines of develop- 
ment. But in this case I think you see the 
lines, though early divaricated, more and more 
intertwined. In a modern Sabbath it is hard 
to separate the human considerations which 
secure its observance from those that are of 
divine impress. Men have learned to worship 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 



83 



God by kindliness of disposition toward men, 
by fellowship with them, by brotherliness of 
feeling toward them; and men have learned 
that the greatest kindness they can show men 
is to inspire them with the desire to worship 
God. So that in a well-kept Sabbath of to-day 
it is hard to untwine the two original lines and 
tell what belongs to each separately. By as 
much as a man wishes to worship God, by so 
much his heart longs for divine love and peace 
to reign in his own heart toward his fellow, 
By as much as a man longs for unity of heart 
between man and man by so much he desires 
this unity to be taken up into the higher syn- 
thesis of divine love. One has not come to the 
end of his love for his neighbor until he has 
traced it out to where he can surrender his 
own finite affection into the Infinite. So the 
institution has grown complex, and it is hard 
to separate its present potencies into the orig- 
inal elements. 

Not only is the power of the Sabbath great 
but its rank is high. Given a Sabbath fairly 
observed and no other institution has so good 
an influence on men. There is nothing that 
so elevates thought as the common exercises of 
Christian Sabbath worship. We think some- 
times that our Sabbath services are dull and 
that something else would be better. We 



84 



THE TEN WORDS 



contrast the preaching with the entertainment 
and profit we might enjoy from a lecture or 
from some high art in the drama. Now there 
is nothing of this sort that can ever approach 
in grandeur what is brought before the mind 
by any ordinary Sabbath service. The danger 
to the Sabbath as an institution does not come 
from an intellectual quarter. It springs from 
the thoughtlessness that makes physical recrea- 
tion a supreme end in life. There is no theme, 
however great, on which man can lecture that 
is comparable with those brought before us by 
church services, however poor they may be in 
parts. You cannot get through the singing, 
or the prayer, or the sermon, without being 
reminded of God, moral government and im- 
mortality. 

What themes of possible thought can equal 
these in grandeur? A man may lecture on 
the sidereal universe, but a minister must pray 
to the God of the sidereal universe ; must 
preach about the mind and will and heart of 
the Builder and Founder of the system ; and 
the old question comes, Whether is greater, the 
house or the builder thereof ? A man may 
explain to us what is good for the health of 
the body, and he shall do well ; but shall we 
not say that his theme is higher who treats 
of the health of the soul ? Some one will tell 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 85 

us how we may grow into old age with vigor, 
and with gentle decline make our exit from 
the world. * But suppose some one shall tell us 
how, as our outward man perishes, our inward 
man may be renewed day by day ; how, as we 
go gently down the slopes of this life, we may 
be climbing up the ascent of a deathless exist- 
ence. How shall we estimate the latter themes ? 
One can scarcely escape thought upon them in 
any Sabbath service in Christendom. 

Some one tells us to beware of other-world- 
liness. That wisdom may be offset by an ex- 
pansion of the wisdom, " Beware of the man 
of one book." Beware of the man of one 
world. The man of one book must have a 
narrow mind. The man who has but one 
planetary world in the physical sense, who 
confines his thoughts to this world as a cen- 
tral affair in the universe, is a laughing-stock 
in science. The man in like manner who 
eliminates immortality from his thought has a 
cramped soul. It is because religion has an 
element of other-worldliness about it that it is 
great. ISTow all these great themes of thought 
and the great issues of existence are the com- 
mon themes of the Sabbath. Whoever shuts 
himself off from contemplation upon them 
does not do as well as he might. He lets him- 
self down to lower things and lower themes. 



86 



THE TEN WORDS 



The Sabbath, as a religious institution, then, 
holds men up to the highest possible thought. 
It will be a sad day for mind when we shall 
discard the religious services of the churches 
on the Sabbath, and " shall eat and drink and 
rise up to play." It is history, and it will be 
history, that the nations and parts of nations 
that are the best Sabbath observers, i. e., that 
best hallow the Sabbath to the Lord, L e., that * 
hold themselves to exercises and to thoughts 
that are grouped about the existence of God and 
his government, are the nations that, to use a 
prophet's language, " ride upon the high places 
of the earth." 

When the question is up before us what sort 
of observance the Sabbath shall have, facts of 
such transcendent importance should be kept in 
mind. You cannot have a Sabbath that shall 
fulfil its highest purpose and possibilities, un- 
less it be a Sabbath hallowed to the Lord. 
How we can get at that result may be a ques- 
tion. We can go on doubtless in the direction 
of the improvement of our exercises of Sab- 
bath worship, but when we leave out of them a 
clarion call to grapple with the great themes 
of the infinity of God in all directions, and the 
limitless existence of man in one, we are not in 
the way of improvement. We have dropped 
below what is befitting the majesty of the na- 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 



87 



ture and the destiny of man. We shall do best 
when we keep our Sabbath on a line of develop- 
ment projected out from that original notion, 
devoting it to the highest themes of thought 
and inspiration : i. <?., hallowing it to the Lord. 

Here let us refer to the relation of working 
men to the Sabbath. There is an evident and 
praiseworthy attempt on the part of working 
men to reduce Sabbath labor. But there is 
one tendency among them which is reprehen- 
sible, because injurious to their own best in- 
terests. I allude to the practice which the 
labor organizations are following of taking 
the Sabbath to themselves for the purpose of 
discussing simply the labor situation. If labor- 
ing men want to dwarf intellect and degrade 
their souls, that is the way to do it. A man 
who works six days in the week, and then 
uses his Sunday to talk with his fellow work- 
men about the labor question, is not out of the 
egg-shell in the career of his development. 
That is to go back to Egypt and grind all the 
time in the labor problem. That is giving up 
the effort for any higher development than 
can be secured by the simple struggle for ex- 
istence. Just what a man needs, who has a 
soul, is, when the Sabbath comes, to get as far 
away from the problem on which he consumes 
his week-day energies as possible. A work- 



58 



THE TEN WORDS 



man ought to recognize that there is a majesty 
about himself, which ought to be delivered 
from the suggestion of the work or wage 
problem, one day in seven. Not to do that is 
essentially to drop to the life of the old cave- 
dwellers. Yet it is getting to be a custom for 
whole families to spend the Sabbath in these 
meetings of the labor unions. Nothing could 
degrade the family more than this, to shut it 
up to constant consideration of the subsistence 
problem, for that is what this course amounts 
to. That is going out into the outer darkness 
voluntarily and shutting the door after one. 

Just where the workmen have made their 
mistake is in quitting the churches. A great 
deal of their dissatisfaction with life comes, 
not so much from actual distress in their prob= 
lem, as from the mental wretchedness and 
woebegoneness that will come upon men who 
perpetually confine their souls to cent, per 
cent, considerations. Their problems become 
mean to themselves because they are never re- 
lieved by high systems of thought. It is said 
that the churches have become rich men's 
clubs — whose fault is it ? Again, the laborers 
should have staid in the churches, insisting on 
their equal manhood with anybody. They 
seem to be able to assert themselves out of the 
churches — why not in ? It is only natural that 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 89 

out of sight should be out of mind, that to be 
in sight is to be in mind. The workman who 
insists on his right to worship God with the 
capitalist puts a heavy mortgage upon the 
capitalist's soul, making him to think of the 
welfare of his brother who worships by his 
side, compelling him to answer before the bar 
of the highest tribunal in the universe whether 
he is dealing justly or not in compensation for 
labor. It is a poor exchange the laborer made 
when he gave up the power of Almighty God 
over the conscience of a capitalist, for the re- 
straint upon his greed of a " walking delegate." 
This the laborer did when he retired from the 
churches on the Sabbath. He will find ulti- 
mately that he cannot succeed with a Sabbath 
that means simply cessation from toil. He 
must have one that infuses all souls with the 
high inspirations which derive the brother- 
hood of man from the fatherhood of God. 
When life becomes simply a question of the 
adjustments of self-interests, the weakest and 
he who has least will always go to the wall. 
When life is inspired by higher motives there 
will be a chance for more equitable adjust- 
ments. So that to-day the greatest weapon of 
defence and offence that labor can have is the 
spiritual power upon men of the influence of a 
Sabbath hallowed to God. Here is a Trades 



90 



TEE TEX WORDS 



Assembly sitting on Sunday and passing reso- 
lutions in favor of Sunday closing of barber 
shops. Did a man ever inspire respect for an 
institution which he himself was profaning ? 
If the Trades Assembly wants to secure the 
closing of barber shops on Sunday, let the 
Trades Assembly meet on Monday and pass 
resolutions and they will have some influence. 
Most people will think that a barber, quietly 
shaving a customer, is not farther off the line 
of duty than a Trades Assembly chopping 
the hash of work problems on Sunday. Ke- 
spect for the Sabbath as a day of rest comes 
out of religion. ^rtlien religious uses cease to 
be the dominant element in the institution 
men will 

" Perceive it die away 
And fade into the light of common day." 

Where the Sabbath has been made a day of 
play it has become a day of work. That is 
history. Men do not have, never have had, 
and never will have the respect for play that 
they do for religion. Charles Kingsley says : 
" Is there anything about one idle day in seven 
in the traditions of Mammon ? "When the de- 
mand-comes the supply must come; and will 
in spite of foolish auld-warld notion about 
keeping days holy — or keeping contracts holy 
either, for. indeed. Mammon has no conscience.*' 



THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 



91 



The Third Commandment is restraint upon 
speech ; the Fourth upon folly and greed. 

There is an old fact of history that is typ- 
ical of the care religion has had oyer the rest 
of the Sabbath day. Constantine, in an edict 
regulating the obseryance of the Sabbath, for- 
bade the courts of the empire to sit on that 
day, except for the manumission of slayes. 
AVhoeyer destroys the religious sacredness of 
the Sabbath does so much toward forging the 
fetters of toil. 

Look at the institution as it exists to-day. 
How kindly it has become ! How sweet are 
the hours of rest to tired industry ! How 
blessed are the influences that come oyer all 
hearts as we gather to our worship with the 
simple consciousness of equal brotherhood be- 
neath the loye of our common heayenly 
Father ! AYhat becomes of the dark brood- 
ings of care and anxiety when the soul is 
borne aboye in the adoration of song ? And 
how thought upon the struggle for existence 
fades into nothingness beside thought upon the 
struggle that fits for existence sacred and end- 
less — for eternal life. 

" From Bolton's old monastic tower 
The bells ring loud with gladsome power : 
The sun is bright; the fields are gay 
With people in their best array 



92 



THE TEN WORDS 



Of stole and doublet, hood and scarf, 
Along the banks of the crystal Wharf, 
Through the vale retired and lowly, 
Trooping to that summons holy. 
And, up among the moorlands, see 
What sprinklings of blithe company — 
Of lasses and of shepherd grooms, 
That down the steep hills force their way, 
Like cattle through the budded brooms; 
Path, or no path, what care they ! 
And thus in joyous mood they hie 
To Bolton's mouldering priory. 

* -x- * 

" Fast the churchyard fills ; anon 
Look again, and they all are gone : 
The cluster round the porch, and the folk 
Who sat in the shade of the Prior's oak ! 
And scarcely have they disappeared 
Ere the prelusive hymn is heard : 
With one consent the people rejoice, 
Filling the church with a lofty voice ! 
They sing a service which they feel : 
For 't is the sunrise now of zeal, 
And faith and hope are in their prime, 
In great Eliza's golden time. 

"A moment ends the fervent din, 
And all is hushed, without and within ; 
For, though the priest more tranquilly 
Recites the holy liturgy, 
The only voice which you can hear 
Is the river murmuring near." 

— The White Doe of Rylstone. 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, 
and honor the face of the old man. — Lev. 19 : 
32. 



94 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



" Honor thy father and thy mother : that thy days may be 
long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." — 
Ex. 20 : 12 ; Deut 5:16. 

Ixxumeeable considerations of sentiment 
start before the mind as we hear this com- 
mandment. The whole host of tender and 
sacred affections, which we connect with the 
thought of father, mother, the family and 
home, on the repetition of this commandment, 
springs into life. Yet I doubt if the com- 
mandment had this which we feel, in its im- 
mediate view, when it was first given. These 
noble and refined sentiments, which are a first 
suggestion to us as we repeat the command- 
ment, are, rather, " the long result of time," in 
the onward and upward struggle of the race 
toward higher realms of the good. The date 
of the comment, " That thy days may be long 
upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth 
thee," is not known, but there is every reason 
to believe that it followed hard upon the re- 
ception of the text of the command, and is, in 
fair probabilitv, the work of the lawgiver him- 
self. 

95 



96 



THE TEN WORDS 



"We can readily see why, even if this com- 
ment was not itself written on the tables of 
stone, we have warrant to believe it to be of 
Mosaic origin. Moses was called of God to 
found a nation on the basis of belief in one 
God as ruler of the universe, and of the con- 
viction that this God, with whatever forms 
and ceremonies worshiped, demanded right- 
eousness of men. It is on this basis that God 
will make a nation of Israel and preserve it in 
existence. The comment on this Fifth Com- 
mandment, I think, contains within itself pri- 
marily a reference to this proposed destiny of 
Israel. The command itself runs to one of the 
relations inside the family. But the comment 
as reason for observing the command contains 
an appeal to patriotism. The considerations 
in the comment, supporting the command, are 
not so much sentimental as prudential and 
economic The commandment and comment 
meant something like this, as they originally 
came together : Honor thy father and thy 
mother ; by so doing you are on the road to 
the establishment of the nation you seek to 
be ; by so doing you shall dwell long in that 
land which the Lord proposes to give to you. 
Looked at in this way, the strangeness, which 
sometimes seems to cling to this promise in 
connection with this command, disappears. 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



97 



And now, to closer thought, is there not a 
natural connection between the commandment 
and the consideration urged to support it ? 
The two peoples that developed the toughest, 
iron-like nationality, the Hebrews and the Ro- 
mans, traced the foundations of their greatness 
back to a patriarchal condition. The natural 
order of evolution is from the family to the 
clan and from the clan to the nation. We 
may say, given no family attachment, there 
will be no national cement. 

Patriotism depends on the consciousness 
of a record of courage and honor. The use 
of war to a nation is. largely perhaps, not 
so much in furnishing a common cause for 
heroism, as a reservoir of examples of bravery. 
From heroic experiences a national conscious- 
ness develops. But national pride is a result 
rather than a precursor of heroic deeds. The 
preservation of the record of such deeds 'de- 
pends on a preexistent family pride. The 
early history of Rome, and even that which 
comes down to a later date in the national 
life, depends on family tradition. Stories like 
those respecting the Fabii, the Marcelli, and 
the Cornelii, all come to us as family tradition 
preserved in the gens of the hero and nowhere 
else. Of the history of Rome as a state, dur- 
ing the period of her youth — the period to 



98 



THE TEN WORDS 



which the best Romans of later days looked 
back as the golden age of Roman patriotism 
and heroism — we have absolutely no record 
preserved by the state, save at best a bare list 
of consuls. Each family was responsible for 
the narratives of the exploits of its ancestor. 
Whether those narratives are trustworthy or 
untrustworthy does not affect the case. The 
national consciousness of the Roman people 
grew out of those family tales, and not out of 
any authentic list of consuls or even out of the 
tables of the laws. The most effective appeal 
possible to secure unity among the Roman 
people was to some tale of " The Fathers " — 
to a family tradition. Julius Caesar lost his 
life, and Augustus gained his kingdom, be- 
cause one underestimated and the other appre- 
ciated the intense force of the national preju- 
dice against the name of king— a prejudice 
pervading the whole nation, yet dating back 
to a day far beyond the horizon of history, 
and depending for all its vitality on the 
stories of Lucretia, of Horatius, of Brutus, 
which their respective clans had carried down, 
and quite probably embellished, for hundreds 
of years. Rome became the mistress of the 
world by the aid of the myths of " Yiri 
Romse " quite as much as by the actual occur- 
rences of her early history. AH that early 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



99 



history, whether fact or fiction, we owe solely 
to family pride and family tradition. It was 
part of the Eoman religion to preserve the 
record of the memory of the deeds of ances- 
tors in each household. 

A course which we can see was a power 
with Rome could not be otherwise than a 
power with the Hebrew ; and the Fifth Com- 
mandment was the beginning of the direction 
of sentiments and forces that must end in the 
solidifying of a nation. If you cannot inte- 
grate a family, you cannot a nation. In the 
commandment Moses simply inculcated what 
lay at the foundation of all ancient govern- 
ments — shall we not say what must lie at the 
foundation of government ? The promise be- 
longs naturally with the command, because 
in order to have any permanency of govern- 
ment it is necessary to have submission to an 
organization. The only notion of govern- 
ment in early days was, and must have been, 
inseparable from the idea of family or clan 
unification. If you will have a nation there 
must be ties bet ween the generations by which 
the continuity of the national life can be se- 
cured. A permanency of relation between 
parent and child is the first layer of the foun- 
dation upon which your national superstruc- 
ture is to be reared. AVhen every child sets 



100 



THE TEN WORDS 



up for himself independently of his parents all 
possibility of historic continuity is taken 
away, and there can be among men only a dis- 
connected, disintegrated mass of individual 
elements. The social stratum is not a firm 
continuous rock, but a heap of loose sand. 
Why has there never been a national life in 
the South Sea islands ? Simply because of the 
slight connection between the generations. A 
young man, with or without a wife, having a 
boat, put out to sea and took possession of any 
isle that would afford him support, leaving the 
problem of the existence of his father and 
mother to be solved as it might, and in turn 
lie was treated in the same way by his chil- 
dren. So we have as many groups of people 
with unlike dialects as there are isles in the 
sea. So we have a people with no history and 
no tradition, no country and no patriotism. 
If it is desired to prevent a result like that, 
beginning must be made just where Moses be- 
gan, and the generations must be tied together 
with infrangible and sacred bonds. 

I am disposed to pursue thought upon what 
may be called the economic considerations 
which are hidden in this commandment. We 
do not realize how much we owe to the gen- 
erations which have preceded us. It is a sort 
of commonplace that we owe ever} T thing to 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



101 



God, though I do not think there is largely 
any definite conception of how it is that we 
owe everything to him. But we cannot stop 
in the matter of indebtedness with what we 
owe God. We owe everything to our ancestry 
as well as to God. We are made by tradition ; 
by what is handed down to us from former 
generations, mostly on family lines. Were it 
not for tradition we should be in a sorry 
plight, What would have been our condition 
had we been taken as children and put on 
some lone isle, and the connection between 
us and our ancestry broken up ? The result 
would be simply reduction to instantaneous 
barbarism. That is not an inconceivable sup- 
position. It has probably been done with 
children over and over again in the history 
of man. The waifs have found food enough, 
spontaneously provided, for sustenance, and 
there they have begun the problem of life 
from the very beginning. Every new lan- 
guage or dialect has doubtless risen out of iso- 
lation. Man is worse off than the animals in 
this kind of struggle in the disconnection of 
the generations. He receives his benefactions 
from the former generations by tradition. The 
animals take their legacies through instinct^ 
To be born, with them, is substantially to in- 
herit all they can. Instinct is said to be in- 



/ 



102 THE TEN WORDS 

herited memory — quasi inherited, is probably 
the proper qualification. What wit the parent 
animals have, or have won by experience, goes 
to their offspring by instinct. But man has 
next to no inherited memory. He learns of 
his parents, not by being born of them, but by 
being taught by them. Inheritance is reduced 
to very low terms in the birth of man. He 
has to be taught by others what the animals 
know of themselves. And this great addition 
beyond what animals can attain — his intellec- 
tual and moral possessions— is in his hands al- 
most totally the gift of the teaching of parents. 

So, too, is all that wealth, that physical com- 
fort and advantage which he has won out of 
the struggle with nature. However great the 
industrial inventions may be in any generation, 
they make no such contribution to his happi- 
ness as comes from traditions of that which 
his fathers had already won. In respect to 
food, shelter, clothing, the generations have 
much in common. Then again we must re- 
member that however great the advances one 
generation may make over another, they are 
all projected from vantage ground furnished 
by that former generation. This is the era of 
industrial inventions. But our success is due 
to the fact that industry was an inspiration 
of the former generation. Our fathers and 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 103 

mothers were zealous to do something, though 
they reaped grain with a sickle. They were 
zealous to know something also, and they put 
the schoolhouse on every hillside whence came 
quickened intellects to grapple with all the dif- 
ficulties of life. Out of these inspirations of 
the fathers and mothers, coupled with the con- 
quests over nature which they had received 
and won, came the cotton gin and the self- 
binding reaper and their kin inventions. It 
does not do to deride the preceding genera- 
tion. We could no more dispense with what 
it gave us, as outfit in the game of life, than 
fruit could dispense with stem and branch and 
trunk and root. We are indebted to that gen- 
eration not only for existence but for almost 
everything that makes existence valuable. 

The instruction which makes it possible for 
us to get along in life comes down the line of 
families. It is what father and mother have 
told us that constitutes the staple of our 
knowledge. We may go to school and learn 
ever so much from books or from others, but 
what we get from these sources is of com- 
paratively little value so far as getting stable 
footing in life is concerned. What we learn, 
after we become able to leave the family in 
which we were born, is as nothing in com- 
parison with what we have been taught before 



104 



THE TEX WORDS 



leaving it. We have forgotten more of that 
teaching than we retain in memory, yet what 
vre have forgotten has been and is, if any- 
thing, more essential to us than what memory 
holds. "We simply borrowed our life during 
our childhood from the incessant care of our 
parents. We have not much instinct in the 
sense of inherited memory, but we have adap- 
tations to life which have been taught us, the 
memory of whose times, means and modes of 
teaching, has disappeared from the horizon of 
our consciousness. There come down upon us 
special blessings from out our family lines of 
whose value we rarely think. Every family 
line has traditions, invaluable to it, that might 
be useless to those on another family line. 
And he will not be wise who disregards these 
special family traditions. Take the liability 
to certain diseases which runs along many a 
family stock, which in one way or another 
chases all family lines. Xow it is a great mis- 
fortune for any one to be removed from his 
own family line, in early years, so that he 
would fail to get hold of the accumulated 
family wisdom with regard to methods of 
combating by diet, dress, exercise, general 
and particular attention, the constitutional 
malady. Father and mother and grandfather 
and grandmother do know best what dangers 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



105 



lie before their inexperienced offspring. It is 
perilous to be deprived of that knowledge, and 
it can be but moral culpability to disregard it 
when one has it. In regard to this whole 
matter of adaptation to life, and to success in 
it. one may be sure that there is more of wis- 
dom lying behind him than he by his single 
wit can develop before him. If he feels inde- 
pendent^ if he will stop to analyze his inde- 
pendence, he will find it an outfit of prepara- 
tion which has been born and bred and taught 
into him, and he will do well to have some 
gratitude to the sources whence his own felt 
ability springs. This line of thought I fear is 
not as familiar as it ought to be as connected 
with this commandment. But the connection 
is legitimate. 

I rather think the usual conception is that 
the commandment under view is a child's com- 
mandment — good, say, till twenty-one years 
of age. But in the Mosaic day there was at 
no age, among any people, such arbitrary legal 
bar thrust across the relation between parent 
and child. That relation was unbroken, un- 
barred through life, as it substantially is 
among Oriental peoples to-day. This was no 
child's commandment. It was given to full- 
grown men. It had, as its own comment 
shows, largely a political purpose in view. It 



106 



THE TEX WORDS 



was a means to a patriotic end. Individual in 
its application, yet its result would be to Israel 
a firm and strong grasp on the land to which 
lie was going. It would work the formation 
there of a permanent national life. I think 
we can see the connection between the means 
and the end in view. The Fourth Command- 
ment, as given in Deuteronomy, had national 
intents in view. It was meant by it to bind 
man to man by the memory of a common 
slavery ; this Fifth to bind generation to gener- 
ation by a common ambition and hope. 

The genius of this commandment is con- 
servation. It calls upon men to respect the 
already accumulated results of human experi- 
ence. We are all in this day disciples of prog- 
ress, but we need to be reminded that progress 
cannot be projected out of nothing — that to 
begin de novo anywhere is to begin out of 
nothing — to give up all that man has achieved 
and go back to barbarism at once. Give me a 
place, said Archimedes, whereon to put my 
lever and I can move the world. We are too 
apt to think we can move the world without 
any rest for our lever. "Whoever would move 
men must take account of them as they have 
been and are. must respect that which is. as 
well as that which is to be. or ought to be. 
There will be a reason with men for almost 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



107 



anything that largely prevails. If that reason 
has ceased to have force, yet it should be met 
in a rational, a reasonable way, and, in kindly 
respectfulness, the new wisdom be brought 
forward to replace it. This will be found to 
be good and serviceable philosophy every- 
where. If a man is using poor tools, of an- 
cient cast, kindly show him the benefit of the 
newer pattern. The disposition that disre- 
gards the wisdom of father and mother, and 
the impatience with all things old, is of one 
and the same piece of cloth. Your implacable, 
unmodifiable and unmollifiable radical is at 
war with the spirit of this command. He has 
little respect and no reverence. He cries : 

" Of old things, all are over old, 

Of good things, none are good enough. 
We '11 show that we can help to frame 
A world of other stuff." 

But that is the voice of outlawry. Eob Eoy 
never succeeded in becoming^ king and found- 
ing a nation, and he never could on that plat- 
form. 

The radical communist breaks the family in 
two in the midst of its contemporary life, 
putting in divorce between husband and Avife 
at will, even if he goes so far as to acknowl- 
edge any such regulation as legal divorce at 
all. But it is not so plainly seen, and yet it is 



108 



THE TEX WORDS 



a truth, that he makes as radical a break in 
the consecutive life of the family ; that he is 
at war with the Fifth Commandment as well as 
the seventh. In fact, the primary trouble with 
him is his forgetfulness of the Fifth Command- 
ment. He sets at naught his father and his 
mother, and despises the continuity of the 
generations and the wisdom that has come 
down the line of their experience. He has 
forgotten that one of the roads out of the 
house of bondage, where an individual man 
has no rights which any other man is bound 
to respect, is by the establishment of an in- 
dissoluble tie between the generations along 
which the knowledge and power accumulated 
by experience may pass. Slavery made no 
account of the tie between parent and child; 
if it had, it would have been compelled to re- 
spect the tie between husband and wife. Xot 
only will the radical communist, the believer 
in sex promiscuity, cease to reverence father 
and mother, but he has ceased to reverence 
them to become such communist. 

Mormonism would show cleavage between 
the generations, would reenact the role of the 
very Indian it has supplanted and break up 
into tribe and dialect, were it not held to- 
gether by extraneous forces. History tells a 
long tale on that matter. And like causes 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 



109 



under like conditions would produce like ef- 
fects. 

I come up usually on the other side of the 
question, but I want here to put in appearance 
as an advocate for the established creeds of 
the Church. They represent what the fathers 
and mothers have thought, have loved or 
feared, and are worthy of reverence. In no 
spirit of wanton insolence will a just man, 
filled with filial affection, attack them. They 
are to be modified, if at all, as a dutiful son 
would set aside a judgment of his father ; only 
because he must, as moral duty, preserving 
always respectfulness of spirit and demeanor. 
Arthur Hugh Clough in fine poetic guise has 
set forth the proper disposition of the soul in 
this matter : 

M Old things need not be therefore true, 
0 brother man, nor yet the new, 
Ah, still awhile the old thought retain, 
And yet consider it again ! 

" The souls of now two thousand years 
Have laid up here their toils and fears, 
And all the earnings of their pain. 
Ah, yet consider it again ! " 

t There is a great loss attending the circum- 
stances under which this generation is passing 
its life. AVe have advantages connected with 
the privilege of beginning anew in setting up 



110 



THE TEX WORDS 



society, but we suffer disadvantage in the 
breaking up of the connection on family lines. 
It is a misfortune to our children that they 
can remember only us — only their parents — 
and that they are separated by 1,000 or 2.000 
miles, or by the distance over the sea. from the 
old family home with its long line of traditions. 
There may be gain about the condition in some 
respects, but there is great loss about it also. 
It is wholesome for a man to have a long family 
line behind him. Indeed, there has had to be 
something wholesome about the line, or it 
would not be long. There is moral quicken- 
ing and restraint to one who is on the old 
ground where his fathers and mothers for gen- 
eration after generation have wrought right- 
eousness. TVe lose much when we abruptly 
break connection with that power and start 
again anew. That was a proper idea after all 
that lay in this commandment : " that thy 
days may be long upon the land which the 
Lord thy God giveth thee/' Out of long 
duration on the land come some of the most 
refined blessings, some of the noblest elements 
and privileges of moral culture. " Honor thy 
father and thy mother.'' Ah, yes. but you 
must see some elements of permanency about 
the life they have led in order to arouse the 
feeling of honor. AVhere you saw them in 



THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 111 

the vigor of their prime there you should see 
their hair whiten and the step become meas- 
ured. There is a savor of honor that will 
come to them out of the stability of their 
habitation that you cannot raise on any other 
base. How can you ask a child to honor you 
who has seen you move once or twice every 
year of his childhood, seen you plying like a 
shuttle from one place to another, " without 
any certain dwelling-place " — a child who has 
never seen you honor a father and mother and 
so cannot tell by your example what such 
honor is? There are peculiar disadvantages 
about our situation in this very generation — 
disadvantages which we must look calmly in 
the face and try to remedy. I call attention 
to the fact that it was in the new states — the 
states where the family tie between the gener- 
ations was broken by emigration, that the 
practice began of making little account of the 
tie between husband and wife. And to-day 
one of our newest states soonest gives divorce. 
This Fifth Commandment is the keystone of 
the arch of a true and pure family and social 
life. 

This commandment is very old, was given 
to a people very low in development, whose 
life had been projected against a debased state 
of society, as is witnessed by the 160 children 



112 THE TEX WORDS 

of the Pharaoh before whom Moses stood (on 
whose mummy we may now look), yet there 
is no question about the position of the mother 
in this commandment. She stands out as clear 
as Sinai itself. There is no cloud on her maj- 
esty. Such honor as goes to the father goes 
to the mother. She is no chattel, no piece of 
property, no inferior being, but the mother ; 
no subordinate to the father, but his equal in 
rank, and entitled to equal reverence with him. 

I think we are losing sense of the sacredness 
of this connection between the generations. 
TTe mio'ht well learn something from the 
Chinese. Almost all the religion they have is 
the worship of their ancestors. This is an im- 
perfect religion, but there is no question about 
the wholesomeness of its influence as far as it 
goes ; and it goes a good way. It was the 
u Lares and Penates" that made Pome. It is 
a tremendous leverage you get over a soul 
when you make an impression upon it that it 
must not act unworthy of its ancestry. There 
have been stages in the lives of us all, perhaps, 
when the most powerful moral police over us 
was the feeling that we must not, we could 
not do anything that would bring us in dis- 
credit or dishonor before our fathers. What 
kept order among the 120 students in the 
academy I attended in my boyhood, was noth- 



TEE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 113 

ing more nor less than the awful fear that a 
father might be seen on the streets, coming to 
look after a perverse son. I have seen that 
sight and it was as if the pall of the judgment- 
clay had fallen on the village. The Chinese 
are not foolish — they are operating along the 
line of one of the strongest moral influences 
known to the soul of man. 

Again I want to call attention to the fact 
that this commandment was not issued to a 
kindergarten, but to full-grown men, trying to 
learn how to build a state. It is an ill day 
that suffers that fact to be lost out of sight. 
There is no mark on the time by which, when 
a man becomes twenty-one years of age, he is 
freed from the duty of honoring his father and 
his mother. Thank God this control over our 
hearts is stronger than human custom! How- 
ever old we become we cannot divest ourselves 
of the feeling of childhood before our father 
and mother. Our hair may grow white with 
fourscore years, but father is father and 
mother is mother still. Here we are kept for- 
ever young. Boyhood and girlhood perpetu- 
ally survive in us in the veneration we must 
pay to our father, and we are always children 
to our mother's love. 

An old man lay dying. He was a man of 
wonderful genius and power. He had been 



114 



THE TEN WORDS 



successful in life. He had made friends in 
number, and strength of attachment, such as 
had been given to few men upon earth. He 
knew how to win the hearts of men. and ki the 
applause of listening senates to command." 
But now the end is coming. As the watches 
of the night wear away, brief words, murmured 
now and then, show that his thoughts are 
dwelling upon scenes in the home of his child- 
hood, far back and far away. At length there 
conies, clear and strong, the exclamation — " My 
mother ! mother ! mother ! " And then, as 
was said by a loving eulogist, the silver cord 
was loosed and the golden bowl was broken 
and the spirit of Henry Clay returned to God. 
May it not be said that the spirit of the great 
American commoner returned to his mother 
also, in something of the same tender relation 
which subsisted between them when she 
watched over the opening years of her bright 
and darling child, and he was " The Mill Boy 
of the Slashes." 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 



From the purpose of crime to the act of 
crime there is an abyss wonderful to think of. 
The finger lies on the pistol ; but the man is 
not yet a murderer : nay his whole nature stag- 
gering at such consummation, is there not a 
confused pause rather, — one last instant of pos- 
sibility for him ? Not yet a murderer ; it is 
at the mercy of light trifles whether the most 
fixed idea may not become unfixed. One 
slight twitch of a muscle, the death-flash bursts ; 
and he is it, and will for eternity be it ; and 
earth has become a penal Tartarus for him ; 
his horizon girdled not now with golden hope, 
but with red flames of remorse ; voices from 
the depths of nature sounding, Wo, wo on 
him ! 

Of such stuff are we all made ; on such pow- 
der-mines of bottomless guilt and criminality, 
— " if God restrained not," as is well said, — 
does the purest of us walk. 

— Caklyle, 
French Revolution, Vol. Hi., 22. 



116 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 



" Thou shalt do no murder." Ex. 20: 13; Deut. 5 : 17. 

It seems strange to take up one's pen in an 
orderly, peaceful community in the nineteenth 
century of Christian grace to write about mur- 
der. But there are valid reasons why this 
should be done. No man knows what the pas- 
sions that are within him may lead him to do. 
A fit of anger and a sudden blow, and a man 
may be a murderer. Malice may become set- 
tled " prepense," as the law says, i. e., thought 
out beforehand, till it strikes a way which it 
pursues to the death of its victim. How often 
this happens you can see by looking at the 
proceedings in the courts of justice. No day 
passes, probably, but somewhere some court in 
this land is busy with a murder case, and you 
may have in the same city more than one 
court sitting upon murder cases at one and the 
same time. We know what malice is. We 
have felt its first motions in our hearts. But we 
do not know where malice harbored may lead 
us. We are none of us so clear from the pos- 
sibility of temptation to this sin that we need 

117 



US 



THE TEX WORDS 



think it an idle exercise to have our attention 
called to the Sixth Commandment. Consider- 
ing what is in the human heart, and what is 
going on in society about us. I can but think it 
is still morally profitable, as is customary in 
the Episcopal church, for the clergyman to 
read : " Thou shalt do no murder." and for the 
people to respond: "Lord, have mercy upon 
us and incline our hearts to keep this law." 
It seems that the crime of murder is on the in- 
crease in this land. No other of the enlight- 
ened nations of the earth makes so bad a show- 
ing as we do : and we are going, it seems, from 
bad to worse. There is ample reason, then, 
why we should turn our attention in the direc- 
tion called for by the commandment before us. 

Then. too. we are to remember that our com- 
mandment was given simply as a germ, and as 
such is only the beginning of a very wide rev- 
elation to the soul of man along lines where 
this is the first regulation. This command- 
ment was the first check upon the turbulent, 
insurgent passions of man. It said, however 
wrath or malice may possess your soul, there 
is one extent to which it shall not go — it shall 
nut take the life of another. Consider the 
times when and the circumstances under which 
this commandment was uttered, and you will 
think that it was a great contribution to mor- 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 



119 



als. The children of Israel were then a pas- 
toral people without cities or definite places of 
holding courts. Life passed under such cir- 
cumstances is one of peculiar exposure to vio- 
lent quarrel, one inviting a man to take all law 
into his own hands for the satisfaction of his 
wrath. There has always been strife, or op- 
portunity for strong provocation to it, between 
the herdmen of various stocks of cattle, from 
the days of Abraham and Lot to the day 
of the cowboy on our own plains. It was upon 
this style of life, without possible resort to 
judge or jury, that the commandment was 
dropped. It simply said, To whatever extent 
your quarrels may go they must not go over 
one limit. That was the commencement, but 
that was not the end of instruction. There 
came One after Moses, of whom it is said Moses 
and the prophets spoke — i. e., to whose more 
perfect work they were but a simple, crude 
beginning — who was not content to prohibit 
the single overt act, but who took hold of that 
inward realm of the spirit out of which come 
overt acts, and commanded regulation and 
peace there. 

So, when we take the Sixth Commandment 
for a text, we must put before us all to which 
humanity has come under the unfolding, direct- 
ing revelation of God. We have had revela- 



120 THE TEN WORDS 

tion, so that we know we must pause not only 
before the overt act but before the first mo- 
tions of the soul that would lead to the deed. 
" Thou shalt do no murder " was the first ex- 
pression of the revelation ; but we are along to 
this in the revelation : " Let all bitterness, and 
wrath, and anger, and clamor, and railing, be 
put away from you, with all malice : and be 
ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiv- 
ing each other, even as God also in Christ for- 
gave you " (Eph. 4 : 31, 32). That is the re- 
sult of the Master's teaching and of his spirit 
on a line where the Sixth Commandment is 
given. The Saviour's method everywhere 
seems one and the same— to go behind all out- 
ward acts— to deal with the spirit out of which 
they spring. To make a pure fountain in the 
soul out of which pure deeds shall flow was 
his divine secret and wisdom. No wonder 
that the people were astonished at his doctrine 
when they were told that they were to control 
all malevolence of feeling. How dear a hatred 
must have been when a man felt at liberty to 
indulge his soul in it provided only he did not, 
pursuant to it, strike a blow which would take 
life! 

In Homer you read of 

" Wrath, which sweeter than down-dropping honey, 
Swells in the breast of a man like smoke. " 



TEE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 



121 



It is easy to let scorn and contempt for 
another reign in our hearts if we only let him 
or her severely alone. But upon this state of 
the heart drops, shining clear as a blazing star 
from heaven, the moral revelation of the 
Saviour : " I say unto you, that except your 
righteousness shall exceed " this righteousness, 
which contents itself with refraining from the 
commission of open acts of crime, "ye shall 
in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven n 
(Matt. 5: 20). "Ye have heard that it was 
said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill ; 
and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of 
the judgment : but I say unto you. that every 
one who is angry with his brother shall be in 
danger of the judgment ; and whosoever shall 
say to his brother. Eaca, shall be in danger of 
the council ; and whosoever shall say, Thou 
fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire. If 
therefore thou art offering thv gift at the altar, 
and there rememberest that thy brother hath 
aught against thee, leave there thy gift before 
the altar, and go thy way. first be reconciled 
to thy brother, and then come and offer thy 
gift " (Matt, 5 : 21-24). 

Eernember that this is Christ's comment on 
the Sixth Commandment. Christ in this way 
" fills up " the old commandment. How it has 
grown under his treatment ! Not only shalt 



122 



THE TEX WORDS 



thou not kill ; thou shalt not harbor a feeling 
out of which the crime of murder can come. 
Thou shalt not be angry with thy brother. 
You shall be perfect even as your Father in 
heaven is perfect, for " He maketh his sun to 
rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain 
on the just and the unjust." So serenely shall 
you bear your soul under all provocations. 
Injury and wrong shall not arouse in you the 
spirit to return like for like. If a man smite 
you on the right cheek you shall be still calm 
of spirit. 

The direction to turn to the smiter the other 
cheek is meant to show how thoroughly in 
equipoise we should hold our own souls. It is 
not meant to be literally followed by the act 
of turning the cheek to the wicked assaulter. 
That would be to come round again to putting 
religion in an overt act as it was when men 
started under the commandment itself. It 
would also, usually, be to deny another revela- 
tion which God has made in man — the duty 
of self-defence. That is written as plainly in 
the soul as the words of Christ are in the Xew 
Testament, and we are not to crowd the one 
revelation forward to the extinction of the 
other. You are to defend your own person 
and your own life, says the revelation within. 
But you shall not do this in the spirit of the 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 



123 



attacking party is Christ's added revelation. 
You shall not take on a murderous spirit sim- 
ply because you are attacked by it. Thus 
Christ tells us to eradicate anger from our 
souls even under the most provoking circum- 
stances. Kot only shall you " do no murder," 
you shall not have the spirit of anger within 
you out of which murder can come. So clear 
and distinct is this principle in the religion of 
Christ that John says : " Whosoever hateth his 
brother is a murderer." Of course, not by 
outward act is he a murderer, but the two 
things are classed together, the act and the 
spirit that leads to it, as equally abominable 
to the Divine Spirit. The spirit of hate under 
the religion of Christ must go out as much as 
the act to which it would lead. 

But the Saviour hunts down some other feel- 
ings beside hatred, when he has this command- 
ment under treatment. He will not suffer one 
to be ruled by anger, but he seems to visit 
with even more condemnation another kind of 
feeling toward a brother man. He says that 
one who shall contemn or despise his brother, 
shall be in danger of condemnation and of the 
sorest punishment. And yet do we not often 
come right there where the Saviour says there 
is nothing but the hell of fire ? How often 
we hear this : "I do not hate him ; I do not 



124 



THE TEX WORDS 



think enough of him to hate him ; I despise 
him." Well, that spirit must go out, so Christ 
says, as much as the anger or the malice pre- 
pense that brings in murder. We cannot think 
of a kingdom of God whose inmates despise 
one another. TTe must have a soul clean of 
that quality. For his own sins or defaults the 
other party must answer. If we wish to be 
heavenly we must have so much of the peace 
of God within us that our souls will not be 
perturbed by any one else's moral condition. 
We are not the judge and are not at liberty to 
set at naught any being God has created. If 
another is wrong or a sinner, we are to schooi 
ourselves to charity. If one has erred, that 
does not authorize us to turn away in con- 
tempt from him. " Brethren, even if a man 
be overtaken in any trespass, ye which are 
spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of 
meekness : looking to thyself, lest thou also be 
tempted. Bear ye one another's burdens, and 
so fulfil the law of Christ. . . . Let each 
man prove his own work " (Gal. 6 : 1-4). 
That is the spirit our religion enjoins us to cul- 
tivate in our own souls. It is that which 
makes heaven ; without that we can see no 
kingdom of God. 

Beginning then with one direction — a com- 
mand not to commit a coarse, brutal, overt act 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 125 

— religion has come to look in upon souls in 
order to repress and extinguish the faintest 
flush of feeling out of which such act could 
come. Murder and hate, or contempt, are all 
of one piece of cloth, and we do not want our 
souls entangled in any part of that wicked 
web. We are to be of heavenly cast, to be 
spiritually minded ; and then we shall have 
restorative power with which to treat souls of 
unheavenly bent. If the salt have lost its 
savor it is good for nothing in itself and can 
preserve nothing else. 

We have before us now some conception of 
what was in view, in the long distance, when 
this commandment was promulgated. Verily, 
it was a small seed, but it has grown until it 
has covered the horizon of the human soul. 
Man can nowhere look out upon his fellow 
man but the Saviour's " fulfilment " of this 
commandment directs his gaze and regulates 
his spirit. 

But now, with this limitless spiritual field 
open before us, we must stop to consider a few 
practical questions. It is evident enough that 
this commandment, and all the spiritual reg- 
ulation that comes out of it, never was in- 
tended to conflict with the necessity of taking 
the life of another in one's oAvn self-defence. 
As has been already said, we find that law of 



126 



THE TEN WORDS 



self-defence ingrained as a part of our constitu- 
tion. We may kill another man to save our 
own life, just as we would grasp and cling to 
a projecting root to save ourselves from falling 
down a precipice. Both actions are instinctive 
and so are of divine authority. The regulative 
principle of religion comes in to say we shall 
have no more malevolence to the man from 
whom our danger came than we shall toward 
the precipice. That at least is the moral idea 
toward which we are to strive. Of course the 
very liberty given to take the life of another 
implies the necessity of the act. If we have 
an alternative, either to take the life, or to 
save ourselves in another way, then the right 
to take the life ceases. But the alternative 
must be one which we see and know at the 
time. We are not guilty of wrong if we dis- 
cover an alternative afterward. That did not 
constitute a part of the situation in which we 
were compelled to act. But we are bound 
even in the stress of danger to seek for alter- 
natives. We get our own right of self-defence 
from the sacredness of human life, and we may 
not deprive another, except by clear necessity, 
of that which we prize so highly for ourselves. 
So the rule is not that we may preserve our 
life at all hazards. The rule is that we must 
incur hazard up to that extreme point where 



THE SIXTH C03IMAND31ENT 127 



the taking the life of another is to us a demon- 
strated necessity for the sake of preserving our 
own; no other alternative being rationally 
possible to us. By this we see that up to this 
point we are to keep in view the possibility of 
preserving another's life as well as our own. 

What is true with regard to self-defence 
may also be true with regard to the defence of 
the life of another. If we see one unjustly at- 
tacked and his life in peril we may defend that 
life as our own. The right of a man to de- 
fend the lives of his family is as clear as the 
right to defend his own life. 

The right to the defence of property stands 
on another footing. If a man comes, even 
by force, to take away our property, the law 
stands ready with its writs of trespass to pun- 
ish him, and its writs of replevin to aid us in 
the recovery of the property, and it is better 
moral adjustment that we ourselves should 
bear some wrong than that we should take 
away even a trespasser's life. In the forum of 
morals we shall see that if we do the latter we 
have done the greater wrong. He can repent 
of his trespass and make restitution, but we 
cannot undo the act we have done nor modify 
the long inexorable train of effects we have 
called into existence. 

There seems to be, however, one case in 



128 



THE TEN WORDS 



which one might take life where the prime in- 
tent of the trespasser is to lay hold of prop- 
perty ; I refer to the case of burglary. But 
here I think the right to take life comes rather 
out of the fact, generally known, that a bur- 
glar is usually ready, upon the slightest notice 
of his act, or of resistance to it, to take life 
himself. It is because he is usually of mur- 
derous intent that one may have the right to 
take his life. Burglary is one of the worst 
crimes. The injury that, in a home, may re- 
sult to delicate constitutions from this crime 
may be lifelong, may be the ruin of a life or 
lives, and so it is perhaps better for persons of 
such criminal intent to know beforehand that 
they are likely to forfeit their lives if caught 
in the act. The Mosaic code justified the kill- 
ing of a burglar if he were found breaking in, 
in the night, but not, it said, " if the sun be 
risen upon him " (Ex. 22 : 3). It considered 
that the probabilities were that he could then 
be dealt with in some other way — a fairly com- 
mon-sense conclusion, which doubtless is good 
common law to-day. Still one is bound to 
think even of the life of a burglar, and if there 
should be an evident chance to have him pun- 
ished by the civil authorities it would be better 
to put much on that chance rather than to 
take his life. I suspect it would be a little 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 



129 



more comfortable for any of us, even if we 
should not accuse ourselves of wrong, in a case 
of homicide, to feel that Ave had cut short no 
man's day upon earth, had not trenched upon 
the prerogative of God to give and require 
life. 

This brings us to the point of the practice of 
carrying deadly weapons, concealed or other- 
wise. Not to go very deep into morals about 
the matter, it would seem that experience is 
against it. We have allowed the right to 
shoot a burglar, yet, to say nothing of other 
sorts of accidents which occur from having 
pistols about a house, I think, if statistics were 
collected upon the point, it would be found 
that more men have shot inmates of their own 
homes than ever have shot burglars. So that 
the privilege of keeping pistols for the sake of 
shooting burglars is not one to be very highly 
prized. There is such a thing as justifiable 
homicide. But a man will find that a mistake 
which has cost the life of his wife or child 
is not very easily justified to himself. The 
objection to having one's bureau covered over 
with deadly weapons is that one is actually 
more likely to kill his own innocent relatives 
than invading criminals. Now a man has no 
right to expose himself to such dreadful pos- 
sibility. A man can scarcely be guiltless of 

9 



130 



TEE TEX WOEDS 



crime who lias habitually kept about himself 
the weapons out of which such horrible re- 
sults can come. And that shows at once the 
reasonableness of the law against carrying 
concealed weapons. A man who has them 
about his person soon consciously learns to 
trust to them instead of to other means, 
moral or civil, or even physical, of less dan- 
gerous sort, of keeping the peace. Under 
sudden temptation no one knows what he 
might be left to do if he had a loaded pistol 
with him. Sudden provocation might lead 
one to give a shot that would take life, and 
leave him forever after to feel remorse for an 
act that would appear excuseless to himself. 
No, there is wrong about having deadly 
weapons for familiar companions. One who 
does it has already theoretically lowered in 
his own estimation the conviction of the sa- 
credness of human life and some accident of 
passion may give him a consciousness of which 
he would give the world to be rid. The fist is 
the most ancient, and is still the most honor- 
able weapon of defence. There is something 
sneaking about a pistol. It has a savor of the 
fang of a reptile, coiled and concealed. 

I cannot fully discuss the subject, but I wish 
to say a word in this connection on capital 
punishment. It is a large question and one 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 131 

which I have beat about all my days with 
various opinion. But I think I have ultimately 
come to a conclusion on that matter that is 
satisfactory to my own mind. In early or 
primitive states of society it is a difficult mat- 
ter to take care of criminals, and the neces- 
sities of the case may compel the infliction of 
a death penalty. Suppose a pastoral people 
with no large towns, no prisons, jails or places 
for detention of criminals. The principle of 
self-defence may justify such a community in 
taking the life of a murderer, or even of one 
guilty of lesser crime. Vigilance committees, 
and lynch-law, and the halter have been justi- 
fiable on our frontier, in my judgment, even 
in the case of horse-thieves. The right of self- 
defence and of defence of property in unsettled 
communities will go, I think, even thus far. 

But the case is different, it seems to me, when 
we have a community settled down with all 
the means and modes of civilized society, with 
regular courts to try those accused of crime, 
and safe places for the detention of those who 
are convicted. A man who has committed 
murder has lost his right to a place in free 
society. The community has the right of self- 
defence against such man. That right of self- 
defence is amply secured when such criminal is 
shut up for life away from the freedom of the 



132 THE TEN WORDS 

community. A state with regular courts and 
a state prison cannot say that it is necessary 
for the defence of human life in its midst that 
a man guilty of murder should be hanged ; it 
cannot say that as against the power of that 
particular prisoner to commit further crime 
among the people. It has a place where it 
can safely shut him away from contact with 
men. The same principle ought to prevail 
with the community that does with the indi- 
vidual : neither should be allowed to take life 
except in strict self-defence. When a man is 
assaulted and has overcome his assailant and 
bound him it is murder for him then to take 
his life. It is not necessary for the self-de- 
fence of any community that a man in hand- 
cuffs be hanged. 

I am aware that there is one point beyond 
this at which it is necessary to look. It is said 
that if you do not hang the man who has un- 
justifiably taken life, some one else will be en- 
couraged to commit murder. But that argu- 
ment falls. Capital punishment has never 
proved a deterrent of crime. "When men were 
hanged in England for two and sixtv sorts of 
crimes, those crimes were more rife than they 
are to-day. Their commission went right on 
in spite of an occupied gallows at every cross- 
road. We hang for murder in most states of 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 133 

the Union, but murders occur just the same. 
The record in respect to that crime is no better 
in the states where capital punishment exists 
than where it does not. "Wisconsin has had 
no capital execution for a generation, yet life 
is as safe in Wisconsin as in any other state of 
the Union. So that experience proves the in- 
validity of this argument for the necessity of 
capital punishment. The state ought not to 
teach disregard for human life, and it does 
when it has a man in its power and can put 
him where he can do no harm, and then de- 
liberately kills him. If the death penalty is to 
be preserved in law it is because of its assumed 
protection to society. But is it not experience 
that because of the existence of this penalty 
society is not protected ? Are not persons ac- 
quitted who would be convicted did not this 
penalty impend ? Can you convict a woman 
of murder in the first degree? Seldom. Xay, 
more, might not a woman, plotting murder, 
reckon on this very reluctance to inflict the 
death penalty on one of her sex as an element 
in her favor in deciding to commit the crime ? 

AYhy preserve a statute which does not pro- 
tect society but rather exposes it to danger ? 
If the statistics of homicide that have been 
afloat in our papers show anything, they show 
that the death penalty is no protection to so- 



134 



THE TEN WORDS 



ciety. It is not a rash judgment to say that 
there are many men guilty of murder free 
among us to-day who would not be free but 
for the existence of the death penalty in our 
statute law. There is a rule in war that if you 
cannot defend one line you must fall back on 
one that you can defend. That would seem to 
be a rule of common sense for civil govern- 
ment as well as for war. 

Sentimental considerations weigh heavily 
against capital punishment. It is coarse, 
brutal business to break a man's neck— more 
brutal not to, when the effort is made, as is 
sometimes the case. It is simply a horrible 
thing to do in the sight of any gathering. 
'We have grown so ashamed of the spectacle 
of a capital execution, are so convinced of its 
brutalizing effect, that executions are now per- 
formed in private. But somebody has to do 
the wretched work and see the wretched sights. 
I doubt the moral right of a community to 
condemn a sheriff to break another man's neck, 
when it has this last man in its full power, de- 
spoiled of every possibility of doing harm. A 
sheriff and the other officers of the law are all 
men, and their moral sensibilities deserve as 
much consideration as those of the rest of the 
community — men, women and children who do 
not hold office. Capital executions are now 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 135 

performed in a way that shows that the com- 
munity is ashamed of the whole business. 
Juries in finding a verdict sometimes affix the 
punishment. Suppose the jury had to execute 
its own sentence, how many juries could be 
found to affix the death penalty ? Capital 
punishment is a lingering relic of barbarism. 
Let us hope that the day may soon come when 
civilized communities will dispense with such 
brutality. If we, individually, hold to the sa- 
creclness of human life, let us try to teach the 
same truth collectively. The community that 
with some persistency enforces just and toler- 
able statutes against crime, and exhibits re= 
fined Christian sensibility toward wrongdoers 
will do the most to repress crime. When so- 
ciety ceases to kill it can make terrible inquisi- 
tion upon murders by mobs. Out of the 
present agitation over murders and lynch-law 
ought to come a state of public sentiment that 
would regard all human life as sacred. If by 
reaction it should contribute to such a result 
our present social degradation might have 
compensation. 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 



O fortunate, O happy day, 

When a new household finds its place 
Among the myriad homes of earth, 
Like a new star just sprung to birth, 
And rolled on its harmonious way 
Into the boundless realms of space ! 

— Longfellow, 
The Hanging of the Crane, 



138 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 



" Thou shalt not commit adultery." — Ex. 20 : 14 ; Deut. 5 : 18. 

The Saviour said there were two great divi- 
sions of religion ; that it had a realm of duties 
pertaining to God. and a realm of duties per- 
taining to man. Roughly, then, we may say 
that half of religion has a divine east and half 
a human cast. But. since the race is made half 
male and half female, we may say that the 
mural adjustment of sex relation constitutes 
half of the human section, or one-fourth of re- 
ligion. Reflection. I think, will justify substan- 
tially this estimate. Admit that we cannot 
measure morals by mathematics, yet if we take 
for our subject the moral adjustment of sex 
relation, it is evident enough that Ave have a 
very large factor in religion before us. Re- 
ligion cannot be silent respecting such immense 
domain. There is a kingdom of God in this 
relationship as well as in all others, and what 
we are to do, if we are Christian, is to set up 
the whole kingdom of God on earth. 

The Seventh Commandment gave to man 
the family. The Seventh Commandment made 
home. It said that whatever children were 

139 



140 



THE TEX WORDS 



born to the race should be family born — born in 
a home and of the home. "We are not to think 
that man never heard of this commandment 
till Israel listened to the thunder of Sinai. 
Men heard this commandment from the time 
when they acquired a moral nature. It was 
written in the constitution of things open to 
human observation, and the still, small voice, 
that is always conversing with human souls, 
whispered it to their hearts. No matter what 
aberrations there may have been or who com- 
mitted them ; whether men after God's own 
heart in other respects, or not ; man, since he 
has been man. has known that a man ought to 
be the husband of one wife and that children 
have the right to be born from that relation. 
However marked departures there may have 
been, monogamy has been the rule with man 
in all races. The instincts of man have run in 
this direction, and what is an instinct but a 
divine voice in the constitution of body or 
soul ? If men violated the rule of monogamy 
there was an undertow of consciousness that 
they were wrong. 

Illustrations of this on a grand scale can be 
seen in ancient history. The Greeks fought 
the Trojan war, not because the Trojan Paris 
had carried away a piece of property in Helen 
the wife of Menelaus. but because a sense of 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 141 

wrong inflicted, when they saw the marital 
rights of a leader invaded, stirred the hearts of 
the people. What gave the Odyssey its charm 
and winged its way down centuries of Greek 
history while the Greeks were yet heathen ? 
It is a story of fidelity, on the part of woman 
at least, in the marriage relation, It held the 
Greek mind because it powerfully expressed 
the Greek ideal. Both of those pieces of an- 
cient literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, 
grew up and held the place they had in the 
public estimation, in great degree, out of the 
perception and the conviction that monogamy, 
and truth in it, was the right in the sex rela- 
tion. A people that can create a picture like 
that of Hector and Andromache and of Pe- 
nelope know well enough the rightness of mo- 
nogamy. So we are not to understand that 
Sinai was the first time and place where the 
principle of the Seventh Commandment was 
made known to men. Eather it had become 
so clear that then and there it came out to 
them in tones of thunder. 

The commandment, as it was given, doubt- 
less simply covered the ground of the integrity 
of the family. Sexual sin outside the marital 
relation was treated in the law as a subject by 
itself. But when we come to consider how 
early in life marriage came in ancient days, 



142 



THE TEN WORDS 



and that betrothal was deemed as sacred as 
marriage itself, we see that the sweep of the 
commandment was well-nigh universal. The 
family was regarded as set up even from early 
childhood by betrothal, and the commandment 
came to protect the family. 

We have said that the commandments were 
all germs. We shall find that to be true in 
this case. But yet how much was included in 
this germ! Nothing less than the greatest, 
holiest of divine institutions for man — the 
family. This commandment stands sentry to 
prevent men from breaking up in complete in- 
dividual isolation — from reverting to solitary 
savagery. Think a moment to what a child is 
born out of the family relation ; now think of 
all children being so born, and you have before 
you the picture of a low plane of animalism 
from which all trace of the moral responsibil- 
ity of fatherhood has disappeared, and where 
even motherhood will be reduced to simple care 
during the short period of helpless infancy. 
Now put up the idea that marriage shall be 
universal, and that the children born in mar- 
riage shall belong genuinely to it, and you 
have created a new heaven and a new earth 
in the sex relations of the race of man. Well, 
so much was in the germ. So much was in 
the Seventh Commandment. 



THE SEVENTH COJUTANDJIEXT 143 



If the theory of evolution be true — and I 
accept it provisionally as a working hypoth- 
esis — what a step upward it was in moral evo- 
lution, when men emerging from the solitari- 
ness or the gregariousness of animalism caught 
sight of the family ideal and began to hold 
themselves to it and to demand of others con- 
formity to its moral principles ! The principle 
of this commandment, wherever it got in on 
the soul of man, demanded self-restraint, as 
well as posited the right of self-defence against 
others : and so here is a shadow, here is a 
foregleam in the commandment itself, or in 
the necessities of the situation which it en- 
forced, of the "fulfilment" or enlargement 
which Christ gave to the commandment when 1 
he came to comment upon it. For what must 
happen if a man will respect his neighbor's 
rights in his family ? Plainly he must not 
think of their invasion. Such thought must be 
abhorrent to his soul. It is this prior ground 
in the thought which the Saviour takes up and 
treats, and we must follow him there if we 
want to get, as Ave ought, and as we desire, 
the whole voice of religion on the great theme 
before us. The method of Jesus was always 
to trace an act back to the antecedent mental 
states out of which the act sprang and deal 
with them. You find him making a general 



144 



THE TEN WORDS 



statement of this method of dealing with sin. 
" For from within, out of the heart of men, 
evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, mur- 
ders, adulteries, coverings, wickedness, deceit, 
lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing, pride, fool- 
ishness : all these evil things proceed from 
within, and defile the man " (Mark 7 : 21-23). 
Looking upon this state within Christ drops 
the general suggestion : " Cleanse first the in- 
side of the cup and of the platter, that the 
outside thereof may become clean also n (Matt. 
23 ; 26). "Working by such general principles 
Christ takes up the matter we have before us, 
and we will meet him as we find him in the 
sermon on the mount : " Ye have heard that 
it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery : 
but I say unto you, that every one that looketh 
on a woman to lust after her hath committed 
adultery with her already in his heart. And 
if thy right eye cause thee to stumble, pluck 
it out, and cast it from thee : for it is profit- 
able for thee that one of thy members should 
perish, and not thy whole body be cast into 
hell" (Matt. 5 : 27-29). 

Thanks to the culture which religion has al- 
ready wrought into society, we are not under 
great necessity to elaborate argument upon 
the duty of observing the Seventh Command- 
ment. But there is, and probably always will 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 145 

be, necessity to go back where the Saviour did 
and treat of the moral hygiene of the mind. 
So long as the race is continued upon the 
earth as it now is, religion will find a possible 
realm of sin connected with the sex relation, 
That it become not an actual realm, if not in 
act at least in thought, it must instruct, warn 
and exhort with wisdom and with patience. 
And its first voice must be that of the Saviour, 
that wrong thought is sin's self— that it is 
wickedness for which men must answer before 
the judgment-seat of God, We are to remem- 
ber that we are to be judged for the currents 
of thought which we allow to sweep over our 
minds, as we are for the deeds that issue from 
our hands. We must make a pure fountain in 
our souls. Men will go to the lake that burn- 
etii with fire, do go to the lake that burnetii 
with fire, for sinful thoughts as well as sinful 
acts. The voice must always be uttered : " Be 
not deceived ; God is not mocked ; for what- 
soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. 
For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of 
the flesh reap corruption " (Gal. 6 : 7, 8). There 
is retribution along that line, retribution stern 
and unrelenting. 

But religion is set to do something in this 
world beside to threaten and to warn. It is 
its business, so far as it has vision to see the 
10 



146 



THE TEN WORDS 



way, to remove bad conditions, to remove 
sources of temptation. Not indeed to take 
away all temptation, always, for that cannot 
be done, but to provide, as far as may be, foils 
to temptation. 

Now experience has proved one principle 
that is of supreme value in dealing with any 
form of the sin under consideration, to wit, the 
most constant and promiscuous commingling 
of boy and girl, youth and maiden, man and 
woman in social life. Herbert Spencer says 
men have always tried every wrong way until 
they have stumbled upon, or been driven to, 
the right one. Nowhere is that discerned to 
be more true than with reference to sex crime 
and sin. To secure virtue it was thought that 
woman ought to be shut away from society. 
Saying nothing about the effect on woman, 
this was just the way to make man interiorly 
vicious. With his life unmodified by the so- 
cial influence of woman, all he had left was 
the thought that sprang out of animal propen- 
sity. When woman was kept in close confine- 
ment, as in a harem, and never appeared in 
public except veiled, men's souls were vice-cor- 
roded. Nothing but sin came out of that state 
of society. The moral palsy that has fallen 
on the Turk founds ultimately in the unnatural 
sex relations prevalent about him. When 



THE SEVEXTH C0313IAXB3IEXT 147 



woman becomes a mere instrument of passion, 
as with the Turk, sin will sit regent in man's 
soul. There is nothing to modify it. There 
are nothing but low, base animal thoughts in 
the situation. China and India are numbed 
by the same cause. "Wherever the free, social 
life of woman is interfered with, moral cor- 
ruption is the result. The marital life of 
French women is said to be not without scan- 
dal. Why ? Before marriage French girls 
are strictly secluded from society. The con- 
sequence is that, when the French girl finds 
her liberty, she takes vengeance for the wrong 
done her in her girlhood's imprisonment. 
Her flirtations come after marriage, instead 
of before, where, in a certain sense of the 
term, they are proper and allowable. But 
what happens on the other side ? French 
boys and young men grow up without the 
taming and refining influence of the society of 
good girls and young women, and the result is 
that the French boy is left to his own unmodi- 
fied animal nature : and, by the time he has 
become a man, he has given up all notions of 
being virtuous himself, however much he may 
desire virtue in his wife. Depriving the sexes 
of free communication with each other in their 
younger years has resulted in making French- 
men shameless in their disregard of sex virtue. 



148 



THE TEX WORDS 



It is commonly understood, it is assumed that 
all men are wrong in act even. When that is 
the case what can be the condition of thought in 
the souls of men ? It is a good deal of a ques- 
tion whether the paralysis of the Turk is not 
settling in on France. The road to moral ruin 
is straight and plain. Where we do not mod- 
ify by high and noble thoughts base ones will 
take possession. From an open, free social 
life with its thousand upon thousands of modi- 
fying suggestions comes moral health. If one 
wants to know how to save a boy from vice, I 
have to say, next after teaching him the fear 
of God, keep him in society. Xo matter if he 
is out late nights, if he is with a promiscuous 
assembly of boys and girls under the reputable 
conditions of our common social life it is all 
well. It depends, of course, upon where and 
with whom he is, but it is even possible that it 
is worse for him to be in his own room alone 
than it is for him to be in a saloon. Drink is 
not the only thing over which a boy can go to 
pieces. It is possible that the lesser danger in 
the regulation of his moral nature comes from 
drink. The vices of the body are essentially 
solitary. Appetites and passions are essen- 
tially personal. When a man begins to drink 
to gratify his appetite he will drink alone. 
When a man is a captive to drink he will 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 149 



shun society, and especially the society of 
women. If you want to know where a * 
break-up is coming on that question, you will 
find it when you find a man settling into him- 
self, and find the finer flavors of social life 
pall on his taste. Yes, one of the divine ordi- 
nances for the redemption of man from vice 
and sin is the influence of a free, genial, frank, 
warm-hearted social life. Society, society, so- 
ciety ; see that your boys are in it, and when 
they have acquired their own individual taste 
for it, in any of its wholesome modes of ex- 
pression, you may sleep nights. 

A state prison ought to be a safe place for a 
man, ought it not ? There a man is removed 
from all temptation. But the officers of state 
prisons will tell you that the despair of their 
situation is the bad mind, not only that which 
prisoners bring, on the subject we have before 
us, but the cultivation of that bad mind which 
the very isolation of prisoners seems to effect. 
So you get testimony on both sides of this mat- 
ter. Segregation works badly whatever way 
it is effected. Now he that runs ought to be 
able to read, and he that reads ought to run. 
Multiply and make attractive social influences. 
" Ye know how to interpret the face of the 
earth and the heaven," how is it that ye know 
not how to interpret such moral signs ? 



150 



THE TEX WORDS 



The matter of mental hygiene is of great 
importance. The Saviour has given us the end 
in view — complete purity of heart. How to 
attain that end he has left open to the wisdom 
of man enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Of 
course all ambitions are valuable aids. If you 
can fairly start an ambition in a mind it is 
safe. Many of our millionaires are held up to 
a great deal of execration in these days ; I am 
not sure but to much more than they deserve ; 
but we can use them here for illustration for 
our purposes. We know the humble origin of 
many of them, and we know how early they 
took on the notion that they would gather and 
save property. One thing is sure, they found 
little time under their ambition for property 
for thought of vice. They may not have done 
as well with their financial ambition as they 
ought, but as against animal propensity it was 
to them a saving ordinance. It oftentimes 
saved them from the destruction of drunken- 
ness and sex sin. 

Here, too, is the social ambition. When one 
has caught the flush of that noble ambition to 
stand well in society, to win social approba- 
tion, to do the things that are of good report, 
praiseworthy in nature, his mind, so preoccu- 
pied, casts out everything that is base. I 
know on mentioning this consideration some 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 151 



one will say that I ought to teach that one 
should do what is right because it is right, and 
not because people speak well of it. But 
virtue is not wholly a solitary affair. There is 
a social element in its reward which ought 
never to be obscured. There is such a thing 
as the communion of saints, and the joy of that 
communion is a distinct attraction to the soul, 
and men have a right to an ambition covering 
that distinct element. Behind higher or more 
inclusive considerations we have no right to 
hide entirely from sight those less expanded. 
One has a right to the ambition for good stand- 
ing in society. This ambition is embryonic 
within us. Would it were a stronger power ! 

Then there is the educational ambition, not 
merely the ambition to know something, but 
the ambition to bring the mind in contact with 
the thought of the best minds in the world. 
A library in a home is one of the mightiest 
agencies for the overthrow of sin known to 
man. There is the sword of Valiant and Great 
Heart in it. When a mind has struck the am- 
bition to come in contact with what an ordinary 
home library can reveal it will scorn to stoop to 
indulge in wrong thought. To the tempted I 
say, Bead. The formula for all salvation is 
" metcmoeite" — change the mind. "When you 
are living with Brescott and Motley and 



152 



THE TEN WORDS 



Parkman and Irving and Longfellow and 
Whittier and Holmes and Scott and Words- 
worth and Tennyson, or with the great army 
of modern writers of lesser note, you will pass 
into another mental kingdom, and you will be- 
come ashamed of impurity of thought and will 
be made ready to stand before the Saviour's 
soul-inspecting judgment. 

I stop to say, What a treasure we have in 
English and American literature of the last 
one hundred years ! There can scarcely be 
found a word or a thought in it that would oc- 
casion a blush or start a suggestion of wrong. 
"Behold, I make a new heaven and a new 
earth." Do you want to see that process ? 
You have only to look at the literature of the 
past century and compare it with what went 
before and you have seen the thing done. As 
one looks on the literature of the past one 
hundred years he thinks its pages are the very 
" leaves of the tree of life for the healing of 
the nations." 

I fear there is an incoming tide of baser 
literature. Writers who are not capable of 
the beautiful and the good are exploiting the 
ugly and the base. I fear they find tolerant, 
listening ears. I fear that, as of old in Thy- 
atira, unless one knows " the depths of Satan," 
he is looked upon with some compassion. But, 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 153 



ah, me ! I can find enough of literature that 
is without taint. A vaunt with your com- 
post heaps ! I do not want to fork them 
over. I prefer clean sod and the upper air. 
I like anemones and columbine and the great 
summits of eternal whiteness. 

I hope Zola will now devote himself to re- 
forming French law instead of corrupting lit- 
erature and the souls of men. And it may be 
said that no people who had ever had an in- 
tent to observe the righteousness of the law- 
giving God in the marriage relation would 
have been left to make the chaos of their 
law and practice of evidence to be such a 
laughing-stock as it is to-day before the na- 
tions of the earth. " Art," says Wordsworth, 
"is selection." Look at Zola. Says Tenny- 
son : " He shows the evils of the world with- 
out the ideal. His art is monstrous." Here 
is a judgment of Tennyson over the whole 
domain of art as well as of literature. It is 
worthy of attention : 

"Art for Art's sake ! Hail truest Lord of Hell ! 

Hail Genius, Master of the Moral Will ! 
' The filthiest of all paintings painted well 
Is mightier than the purest painted ill ! ' 
Yes, mightier than the purest painted well, 
So prone are we toward the broadway to Hell." 



154 



THE TEN WORDS 



u There is hardly a greater crime than for a 
man of genius to propagate vice b} r his written 
words." 

Lowell said with regard to some poet's erotic 
verse : " I am too old to have a painted hetaira 
palmed off on me for a Muse, and I hold un- 
chastity of mind to be worse than that of body. 
Why should a man by choice go down to live 
in his cellar instead of mounting to those fair 
upper chambers which look toward the sun- 
rise of that Easter which shall greet the resur- 
rection of the soul from the body of this 
death ? . . . Let no man write a line that 
he would not have his daughter read. AYhen 
a man begins to lust after the Muse instead of 
loving her, he may be sure that it is never the 
Muse that he embraces. .... The true 
church of poetry is founded on a rock, and I 
have no fear that these smutchy back-doors of 
hell shall prevail against her." 

Defence of athletics will rest in eminent 
degree on ground at which we have now ar- 
rived. They cultivate an ambition for purity 
of life as a necessary means of manly beauty 
and strength. 

Then why may we not have a distinct am- 
bition to cover just exactly this ground of 
purity of thought called for by the Saviour ? 
To achieve that is to be great, is to be manly, 



THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 155 

is to be strong. Why would it not be a noble 
ambition to say that we would pass through 
this life in such way that no woman could 
look in our face and bring a blush of shame to 
our cheek, not even if she could see to the 
thoughts and intents of our hearts ? Here I 
want to say that I believe that there is a great 
multitude whom no man can number of men 
who have lived and are living who have held 
themselves true to that ideal. It is a great lie 
of the father of lies that all men are corrupt or 
have been at some period of their lives. The 
number is innumerable who have lived and 
who live in honesty before God and woman. 

The upspringing of such an organization as 
the "White Cross society is a sign of the healthi- 
ness of the times. Look at these principles : 

To treat all women with respect and en- 
deavor to protect them from wrong and deg- 
radation. 

To endeavor to put down all indecent lan- 
guage and coarse jests. 

To maintain the law of purity as equally 
binding upon men and women. 

To endeavor to spread these principles 
among my companions and to try to help my 
younger brothers. 

To use all possible means to fulfil the com- 
mand : " Keep thyself pure." 



156 



THE TEN WORDS 



Why will not every boy grow into manhood 
and go down to old age and the judgment of 
his God under the power of such an ambition ! 
Was not this whole matter well treated in a 
sentence by President Harrison in a speech at 
Salt Lake : " Home — where reigns one un- 
crowned queen, sovereign of one manly and 
loyal heart." 

When I started out I said that one-fourth of 
our moral adjustments would fall within the 
realm of the sex relation. Then of the twelve 
gates of the city of God on earth we can set 
up three by righteousness in this realm. I 
would say to a young man, Think of what is 
due your mother, and due to her whom you 
will love and make your wife, even though 
she may be unknown to-day, and of what you 
would wish for the daughter who is to succeed 
you, and execute that, and you will yourself, 
in this world, " eat of the tree of life, which is 
in the Paradise of God." 

Note. — I have not treated of" Marriage and Divorce," above. 
I refer to a treatise under that title, (Midland Publishing Co., 
Madison, Wisconsin) wherein I have discussed those subjects 
at length. Also I refer to the chapter on Marriage and Divorce 
in my " Chalk Lines over Morals " (C. H. Kerr & Co., Chicago). 



THE EIGHTH C01LMAXDMEXT 



Not looking each of you to his own things, 
but each of you also to the things of others. 

— Phil. 2: 4. 



158 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 



" Thou shalt not steal. " — Ex. 20: 15; Deut. 5 : 19. 

If I wanted to make an argument for the 
existence of God, I would as soon take 'my 
stand on the Eighth Commandment as any- 
where in the universe of mind or matter. The 
notion of the right to private property, how 
came it, and whence came it ? There is noth- 
ing that more clearly marks man off as sepa- 
rate and distinct from his fellow — if you choose 
so to call them — animals than this notion of 
right to private property. A little girl is 
going through the woods with a piece of meat 
in her hands which she is carrying to her 
home. A grown man meets her. He is hun- 
gry, but yet she passes him in safety — is all 
the more safe because she meets him. Sup- 
pose a puppy had been carrying a bone and 
had been met by a large old dog. what would 
have happened ? Why is the result different 
in the one case from that in the other ? That 
the man is afraid of punishment from some 
one. if he takes the meat away from the child, 
does not fill what you know to be the bill of 
the facts in the case. The chances are that 

159 



160 THE TEN WORDS 

the less punishment could be inflicted upon 
the man for taking away the meat, the more 
he would not take it away from her. The 
child is perhaps an orphan, carrying the meat 
to a brother more helpless than herself in a 
lonely cabin. To say that all that deters a 
man from taking away the meat from the 
child is the fear of punishment wretchedly be= 
lies the situation in the human bosom. There 
is another bodv of thought and feeling which 
rules in the human mind under such circum- 
stances — a body of thought and feeling that 
never arose out of any fears whatever. 

Streams do not rise higher than their foun- 
tain. Fear of punishment did not originate 
the sense of chivalry toward the weaker— 
never sprang the conviction of the right of 
the weaker to its own property. Out of one's 
own self-regarding instincts never came the 
notion of the rights of others. Out of any 
notion of what is expedient for one's self never 
came the clear-cut conviction which we have 
that another should not be deprived of his 
property. The fear which the man might 
have that he would get a whipping from some- 
body, or that he might be put in a prison for 
his act, cannot be the cause of the feeling 
which the man has that the little girl has a 
right to her piece of meat. You might breed 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 



161 



men countless generations under the sense of 
that fear and it would never transmute itself 
into that sense of right. Out of nothing noth- 
ing comes, and like breeds like. 

Xor can you account for this sense of rmiit 
of another to his property by any convention 
among men. In the first place, what men do 
not have individually they cannot bring into 
convention. The perception of the right will 
be there before men will agree to observe it, 
In the attempt to account for everything by 
evolution, there is a tendency to jump to con- 
clusions as to the derivation of everything 
from something else unlike itself that is with- 
out warrant. Something like this is the way 
in which some evolutionists attempt to ac- 
count for the origin of the sense of right of 
another to property. One man in a tribe gets 
an apple and another tries to take it away 
from him. In the tussle both have limbs 
broken. The rest of the tribe sit on stones 
about and look on. But, when they see that 
two men who would be useful in war against 
hostile tribes are disabled, they forthwith pass 
a vote that the first one who gets an apple 
shall have the right to it, and in that way the 
sense of the right to property comes in. Well, 
the sense of right could not be brought in by 
a vote unless it was there to be brought in. 
11 



162 



the TEX WOEDS 



And again, conventions of expediency, no 
more than individual considerations of expe- 
diency, can spring the sense of right. The 
truth is that that sense is a separate principle 
of action clearly distinguishable from any 
other ? impossible to be confused with any 
other. It cannot arise by transmutation -of 
any other principle into itself. To be afraid 
to take the property of another, and to respect 
the right of another to that property, are 
states of mind not only easily distinguishable, 
but impossible to be confounded. Because 
two things coexist it does not follow that one 
is the cause of the other. Because one thing- 
antedates another it does not follow that the 
latter sprang out of the former. To say that 
the sense of right grew out of any fear of pun- 
ishment arising from any human basis what- 
ever, is to try to leap over a bridgeless chasm, 
by the help of words. Xothmg is gained by 
the words. While fear of punishment lasted 
it was fear of punishment. When the sense 
of right came it was sense of right — something 
unique, and incommensurable with " fear or 
favor or hope of reward." Then, too, fear of 
punishment in man is a compound affair. 
Something of it is demonstrably not sprung 
from the notion of social control. Something 
of it is private and personal. Something of it 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 163 



is native to the soul, consequent upon wrong 
contemplated or executed. Something of it is 
the premonition or the scourge of the hidden 
Nemesis that bays upon the path of sin. 
When Shakespeare writes : 

" Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
And the first motion, all the interim is 
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : 
The Genius and the mortal instruments 
Are then in council; and the state of man, 
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
The nature of an insurrection : " 

he referred to something besides the terrors of 
an ox-goad or a high sheriff. The germ of 
everything is small, infinitesimal, and it is 
hard and in fact impossible to find any begin- 
nings. But germs both grow and produce 
their like. Those principles of action we find 
employed in the development of the sense of 
right in man, and especially in the develop- 
ment of the sense of right to property. 

When men lived in herds or tribes the sense 
of the right of an individual to property was 
doubtless obscure and feeble, but as the sense 
of individualism emerged the sense of indi- 
vidual right to property became more power- 
ful. 

It was an independent sense. It grew up on 
its own lines. We doubtless have the problem 



164 



THE TEN WORDS 



of the race repeated in the development of a 
child. Who shall say where or when the sense 
of the right of another to his property, as of a 
playmate to its toys, comes in on the nature 
of a child ? Yet it gets in, and by and by, 
where once there was no such thing, now it is 
seen, and then seen to grow stronger and 
stronger. It will grow into quickness and 
strength of action as you train it, of course, 
but the capacity to act in this direction is there 
and that is the thing to be accounted for. A 
capacity and a tendency to recognize the right of 
another to his own, where did it come from, and 
what does it mean ? I can do nothing with 
the matter except to say that I find there is a 
groove cut in the nature of man for action to 
run in, and that he is held to action in that 
groove by constraint of a certain sort from 
the power that cut the groove. In other 
words, I can see no source of origin for the 
sense of the right of another to private prop- 
erty, except the will of the power, not our- 
selves, that makes for right. I think it is 
plain that that power proposed an end for man 
and cut the groove in his nature in which his 
action should run, and holds his mind to the 
groove to secure the end the power has in view. 
I think we strike here a " perfecting tendency " 
an inherent " telesisP 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 165 



So taking our stand on this Eighth Com- 
mandment, which is a commandment to respect 
the right of another to his own. we seem com- 
pelled to look straight into the divine mind 
for the source of its origin. We really do not 
have to wrestle with any questions of inspira- 
tion, or of the special divine legation of Moses, 
to find the authority of God in this command. 
We have only to turn inw r ard and analyze the 
operations of our own souls and we find there 
both the commandment and the God who 
made it, In this commandment we see divine 
revelation well advanced. Doubtless theft 
had as much odium attached to it in the minds 
of Israel as they stood before Sinai as it has 
in this day. By as much as we see the vigor 
of the odium attached to stealing, by so much 
do we see the strength of the conviction of 
the right of private property. If, then, this 
conviction is of divine origin and supported by 
the divine will we may expect to see it prevail 
among men. There are a great many divine 
things, however, that are not by that fact 
destined to prevail among men, or destined to 
prevail without care and trouble on the part 
of man for their maintenance. Brotherly love 
is a condition for man plainly indicated by the 
divine will, but it requires a great deal of 
effort on the part of men to secure the observ- 



166 



THE TEX WORDS 



ance of that which is so plainly indicated. 
We have to teach children the duty and the 
ways of love, and, when we have done our best 
for peace, nations will still go to war. Yet 
the divine law of love is as clear as the sun in 
the heavens. In the same way we are com- 
pelled to teach and enforce the right of private 
property of which stealing is a practical denial. 

Of course, behind every letter is a spirit ; and 
we must get, if we would be Christian, the in- 
spiration of the spirit which would respect the 
right of another to his own property. We 
want not only to keep our hands off our neigh- 
bor's property but to be glad in our souls that 
he has it. "We shall have secured the kingdom 
of God with respect to property when we so 
rejoice in the unmolested possession by every 
man of his own, that it would wound our feel- 
ings if that possession were disturbed. Among 
animals respect of any sort for the property of 
another is of very low degree, sense of the 
right of another there is probably none at all. 
That is the state of nature. Man comes first 
up to a perception of the law of right, and 
then to the glad choice of that law, to spon- 
taneous adhesion to it. This is the state of 
grace. We want the reign of the state of 
grace. 

But, as has been said, for that we must la= 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 167 



bor, to that train and teach. A child is a lit- 
tle animal and as such is an egoistic com- 
munist. It claims everything it can see and 
lay its hands upon. There is no duty more 
sacred than training children to the discern- 
ment of the rights of others and to a willing, 
an enthusiastic, observance of those rights. 
The perception of the right will come with the 
dawning of the moral faculty ; but then will 
come the struggle to secure the spiritual habit 
of adhesion-to the law. 

The training of children is an exceedingly 
grave problem, and one with which I do not 
like much to meddle. But where I have a clear 
perception I think I may express it. The sur- 
est way to teach a child respect for the prop- 
erty of another is to let him have something of 
his own, to which his own right is invariably 
respected. When a child perceives a discrimi- 
nation made and observed respecting himself, 
he will the more readily comprehend the dis- 
crimination required of him respecting the 
property of another. If you give a child a 
toy, give it to him absolutely. He ought to 
have the sense of ownership in the toy as 
against the world, father and mother included. 
You may teach him not to break the toy, not 
to do damage with it. But the child should 
regard the toy as his own as much as the 



168 



THE TEX WORDS 



father regards his farm or his store of goods 
or the money in his pocket as his own. Our 
families are brought up in such a promiscuous 
way, the children having so little sense of the 
individual right of property, as against father 
and mother and each other, that it is really a 
wonder that we do not turn out more thieves 
from our families than we do. It is testimony 
to the great power of the law of God over the 
human mind that there was ever any regard 
for property rights when the old "patris jjotes- 
tas " prevailed, by which a child had no rights 
as against his father, so long as that father 
lived ; or that that regard ever got upon its 
feet under as strict practice as we have seen or 
known in the generations before us, say in Xew 
England, under our law that a child can have 
no title to am^thing till he or she is twenty-one 
years of age. Slavery always nurtured thieves. 

^Vhy all women are not thieves is perhaps a 
greater mystery. As matters stood prior to 
this generation, without property rights as 
against her father until she was twenty-one, 
and then, or before, when she became mar- 
ried, her husband absorbing all the property 
rights for the rest of her life, that woman 
has any recognition of property rights at 
all must be due to the superabounding grace 
of God. Biologically we may say, of course, 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 169 

that what saves her is that she is half father. 
When you come down to the fineness of the 
matter I think this training has had influence 
upon woman. She does not fill the police 
court as a thief as much as a man does, that 
is true, but yet I doubt if she has as clear and 
as strong a conviction upon the right of prop- 
erty as man has. But, considering her per- 
sonal training, that she has any moral nature 
on the subject at all is a wonder. 

But now to return to the case of children. 
In our attempt to teach children to be unselfish 
we, perhaps of tener than in any other way, act 
so as to impair the sense of the right of prop- 
erty. " Mamma, I want "Will's ball." "JSTow, 
Will, let John have your ball ; do n't be self- 
ish." Is not that the way the matter would 
usually be treated in our homes ? But what 
should be done, at least half of the time, is to 
say, " Well, John, the ball is Will's ; if he does 
not want to let you have it, he need not." It 
is necessary for John to know that there are 
some things he cannot have, and there is a good 
place for him to learn the lesson. It is neces- 
sary for John to know that Will has some 
rights which he is bound to respect. Put the 
thing in that way, and Will will learn the les- 
son of unselfishness the next day when he asks 
for John's sled, and finds that that is covered 



170 



THE TEX WORDS 



by John's ownership. T^e shall work in un- 
selfishness, in children, better than in any other 
way, by teaching rigid respect for each other's 
rights. If we want our children to grow up 
respecting the property of others we need to 
have such inspiration bred into them in our 
own homes. I do not know of anything that 
is more agreeable to us than to have our own 
peculium — the things, little or large, that we 
regard as our own — unmolested by others. 
When that feeling in a child has been respected 
all his life he will at least know what it is to 
respect it in another. He has only to interpret 
another by himself. 

I hardly see how, out of a family where 
everything is used by everybody, helter-skel- 
ter, where the first one that gets hold of some- 
thing has it. till some one else gets hold of it, 
there can issue any very sacred notion of the 
right of property. One growing up thus 
would be apt to look on property in any 
one else's hands, out in the world, as only 
accidentally there — as belonging to himself as 
much as to any one if he could only get hold 
of it. TTe regard it as a high crime when a 
postal clerk opens letters. But why should 
he so regard it when he has been brought up 
in a home where every member of the family 
makes common plunder out of the correspond- 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 



171 



ence of every other member — where seals are 
broken irrespective of the party to whom the 
letters are addressed ? Again out of nothing 
nothing comes. When no respect for a letter 
has been taught in the home, no respect may 
be expected in the world outside. It is better 
for parents, even, to trust to the general prin- 
ciples, which they instil, with regard to purity 
of thought and expression than it is to vio- 
late the sense of individual right of a child by 
insisting that his or her correspondence be- 
come common property. 

This matter of letters I use only for illustra- 
tion. There are ten thousand ways in which 
we can be an annoyance to another respecting 
his property, just as we can be by meddling 
with his letters. This impertinent and annoy- 
ing meddlesomeness may not be stealing, but 
it is a violation of a right of which the first 
protection was the commandment, " Thou shalt 
not steal." That germ meant this flower and 
fruit. That crude command meant the fine 
flavor of this spirit. The common law rule, 
" So use your own as not to injure another's," 
grew up on the basis of this command. If you 
may not take the property of another you may 
not injuriously or impertinently meddle with 
it. 

When you look at the spiritual derivatives 



172 



THE TEN WORDS 



of this commandment you will see that we 
need instruction upon their particulars in the 
action of our daily lives. We can scarcely 
pass a day in which we may not have some 
contact with our neighbor's property. It is 
to be inspired by a breath from out the king- 
dom of God to have an ambition that he shall 
have his own precisely as if we were not in 
existence ; or better, to have an ambition that 
his property shall be the better for our exist- 
ence, so that his right to his own may become 
the more valuable. 

We suffer enough in annoyances from 
others to make us see the necessity of great 
care on our own part that we inflict no in- 
jury or annoyance on another. Oftentimes 
the things that disturb us most are damages 
that are trifling in a pecuniary sense. The 
damages are to the spirit. We feel that there 
has been a ruthless invasion of our mind in 
not being allowed to have our own possessions 
as we want them. Why is it that we cannot 
have flowers unmolested on our street lines ; 
that not even fences are a protection to fruit 
or flower? That state of things evidently 
does not grow out of a common resolution to 
let every one else's property alone. Reflection 
will show into what minutiae of our lives the 
spirituality of this old rude commandment will 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 173 

pursue us. This spirituality will regulate the 
details of home life, and it will go out in the 
world and demand reception and acknowl- 
edgment in business and in all public affairs. 

In a recent article in the Sunday Magazine, 
by the Be v. Hugh Price Hughes, on gambling, 
the remark is made that that vice stands in 
the same relation to stealing that dueling bears 
to murder. That is good ethical insight. Be- 
cause one is willing to stake his own life in the 
venture, that does not detract from the malice 
prepense with which he seeks the life of an- 
other. Because one is willing to hazard his 
own money in the effort, that does not annul 
the fact that in betting or gambling of any 
sort the action proceeds from the disposition to 
get another's property without any compensa- 
tion. That is the distinguishing characteristic 
of theft. The criminal intent in either case 
cannot be covered by the element of consent. 

Undue advantage taken of another in trade 
is- a violation of a body of morals which this 
commandment was given to protect. If you 
have dealt unfairly with your neighbor, you 
have in your possession property of his to 
which you have no right. The right to it is 
still in your neighbor. You have his property 
without clue title to it. The common expres- 
sion, " Cheating is as bad as stealing," is not 



174 



THE TEN WORDS 



far out of the way. Both actions are viola- 
tions of the one original right to private prop- 
erty. Really the two are about the same thing ; 
the one is taking property without the knowl- 
edge of the owning party as much as the other. 
You conceal yourself if you go to steal in the 
night ; you conceal important facts if you cheat 
your neighbor. There is something he has not 
seen in the one case as in the other. Dis- 
honesty and fraud are the servants of theft. 
They will be shunned by a righteous mind as 
theft itself. 

Here we come to the great public troubles 
of the day — troubles which threaten the exist- 
ence of government, of society itself. They 
come largely from violations of the spirit of 
this commandment — from a violation of the 
great rule of right that a man shall have only 
his own, and shall not meddle with that of an- 
other. Toward a score of years ago occurred 
a great railroad strike. There came up first 
then to view the evil of that factor in the rail- 
way situation called " watered stock." It was 
seen that if the railwa} 7 companies were not 
trying to make dividends on fictitious stock, 
they could afford to pay their hands such 
wages that they would not need to strike. It 
was found to be the fact that a man could not 
well support a family on the wages paid for 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 175 



some very important positions in the industry. 
I cannot vouch for the correctness of the fol- 
lowing statistics. They are afloat as part and 
parcel of the matter at issue between capital 
and labor, and so have the support of common 
fame. If any appreciable element of them be 
true, that is enough to keep alive the conten- 
tion that industry bears unjust burdens. If 
the amount of this fictitious capital is not ex- 
actly known, that is perhaps worse, practically, 
than if the amount were the largest sum re- 
ported. Omne ignotum pro terrifico as well as 
mirifico. There is nothing worse than a wild 
fight in the dark. It is estimated that in this 
country this factor of watered stock in all its 
departments now amounts to over $2,000,000,- 
000, or more than the existing national debt. 
At six per cent, the interest on this sum 
amounts to $120,000,000 annually. Now think 
just what this situation means. It means that 
some persons have been allowed to assume 
that the people owe them two billions of 
money for which the people have never re- 
ceived a cent, and that these persons are al- 
lowed to collect from the people in railway 
and other charges $120,000,000 as interest on 
this bogus capital. The wonder is that we 
are not having more serious troubles in the 
labor question than we are. $120,000,000 is a 



176 



THE TEX WORDS 



large amount to par annually to a few persons 
as interest on what never had existence. The 
trouble comes not from paying interest on 
legitimate capital, but from paying it on that 
which is fraudulent. If we could deduct 
$120,000,000 this year from the charges which 
the people pay on this fictitious capital, we 
could pay more for the use of legitimate capi- 
tal in railways and other corporations. That 
one single alteration would change ultimately 
the face of the labor situation in the nation. 
I cannot here work out all the healthful con- 
sequences that would flow to the people if this 
element of watered stock could be eliminated 
from the industrial situation. Telegraph stock 
is now estimated at $80,000,000. It is said 
that $20,000,000 is all the telegraph plant 
cost. Then we are paying rates on $60,000,- 
000 of bogus stock. That means that, when 
we pay twenty-five cents for a telegraph mes- 
sage, we should pay only seven cents, and the 
capital that was actually put into the enter- 
prise would receive its proper dividend and 
the cost of service be amply paid. Gas stocks 
are loaded down in the same way. In fact 
everywhere, where the system of watering 
stock can be worked in any enterprise, it is 
worked, and the people are taxed in charges 
to pay interest on counterfeit capital. 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 177 



Now why are these transactions not steal- 
ing ? They seem not only to violate the spirit 
of the Eighth Commandment but its very let- 
ter. If I collect interest on watered stock I 
am taking from my neighbor his property. I 
cannot see that the various lies and fictions by 
which I succeed in getting his money into my 
hands are of any higher grade than the art of 
a thief to distract attention while he picks a 
pocket. 

There would be very much less occasion for 
unrest in the industrial situation if capital 
were capital. The overwhelming majority of 
the people are willing to pay dividends to le- 
gitimate capital ; they want the privilege of 
getting interest on their own savings. But 
the people do object, and do rightly object, to 
make swindlers richer while they grow poorer 
in attempting to make that property which 
never was property. If capitalists want cap- 
ital respected, they must show that it is clean 
capital that they have in their hands. Judg- 
ment must begin at the house of capital. If 
it can show a straight record and clean books 
it need not fear. But will it be a matter of 
wonder if that hydra-headed and Briarean- 
armed creature, called Labor, shall some day 
do some astonishing deed, if that which is and 
that which is not, that which is honest and that 

12 



178 



THE TEN WORDS 



which is dishonest, get so mixed up that he 
cannot tell one from the other ? He may say : 
"I care for nothing, all shall go," and who 
shall say that he has no excuse ? 

The attempted justification of watering stock 
by the claim that the assumed capital repre- 
sents additional value will not hold. A farmer 
may as well claim to charge double for his 
eggs because his farm has increased in value. 

But on the other side we have the phenom- 
enon of communism with which to deal. Com- 
munism is essentially a return to the primitive 
animal condition of man — to the drove — 
where the consciousness of individualism is 
very low, and the moral faculty non-existent. 
I do not mean to say that we shall not do 
more and more in common in general society ; 
we may even come yet to regarding land as 
common property, as we do air ; but we shall 
do nothing of that sort until we come to it by 
general consent, and such day is }^et some way 
off. The progress of man lies along the line 
of the freest individualism and the most pro- 
found respect for individual rights. Man will 
be at his highest, not when he can lay his 
hands on everything and say, " This is mine," 
or when he is relieved from the moral and 
legal compulsion to say, " That is yours," but 
when he can look on very much about him 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 179 

and say : " That is my neighbor's, and I would 
not for the universe touch it." 

There are men by the million who need to 
have the ambition to have and to hold private 
property sharpened and not dulled. If we 
evoke the proper action of the moral faculty 
to regulate this ambition we shall solve all the 
difficulties that now threaten us. When each 
man shall strive legitimately for something of 
his own, and when each shall respect the right 
of his neighbor to that which he has legiti- 
mately gained ; when each shall so use his own 
as, not only not to injure another, but to help 
him, we shall have peace. There will be no 
contest between labor and capital ; in the 
realm of industry the kingdom of God will 
have come. 

It is a fair question to ask, How much the 
spirit of communism, over a wide, if not its 
widest range, differs from that of gambling : 
i. e. 9 willingness to throw away what one has 
for the sake of a grab at what others possess. 
Communism may be a return to childhood — to 
the state of development represented by the 
disposition to stuff everything into the mouth 
that the hand can lay hold of. It may be Jim 
wanting everything that Jack has, just because 
he sees Jack have it. It may be untrained, 
unconquered, dictatorial selfishness. Its pre- 



180 



THE TEN WORDS 



dominant inspiration may be, "Nobody shall 
have anything that I don't have." 

The other day I took five and one-half 
bushels of pears from a Clapp's Favorite tree. 
Twenty years ago the farmers in my neigh- 
borhood told me I could not raise pears. But 
I set out my trees and took care of them, and 
now I have my reward. As I gathered my 
crop I did not see but that the following is as 
good social science as much that is rife. My 
neighbors could say : Go to now ; in the 
division of pears this man has more than his 
share. He has all the pears raised in this 
community and we have none. The rich are 
growing richer and the poor are growing 
poorer. Besides, these pears were elaborated 
from the earth and the air. The earth and 
the air cannot be subject to monopoly. They 
are a gift of God to all his children alike. 
What right has this man to take common 
elements from air and earth, fix them in his 
pears and claim them as his own ? His wealth 
in fruit comes from an unearned increment, 
one that belongs in common to us all. Civi- 
lization is a failure in this neighborhood when 
one man has all the pears and we have none. 

Note.— A friend suggests that time is private property as 
much as are things material. No man has any more right to be 
a bore than he has to be a thief. 



THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 181 



Come now, let us reassert our lapsed rights and 
gather and bear to our homes our share of the 
pears. 

A child remarked as the basket was piled 
with the luscious fruit, " Well, I am glad I 
live in an age when there is some lingering 
respect for the command : ' Thou shalt not 
steal.' " May no child be born to a social 
state in which the philosophy of the right to 
private property shall be a spent force ! 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 



There is a lust in man, no charm can tame. 
Of loudly publishing his neighbor's shame : 
On eagle's wings immortal scandals fly, 
"While virtuous actions are but born and die. 

— Juyexal. TV. anon. 



184 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 



"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." — 
Ex. 20 : 16 ; Deut. 5 : 20. 

So far from its being true that there is no 
commandment enjoining truthfulness, among 
the Mosaic ten, that is the only virtue injunc- 
tion upon which is duplicated. 

AVe have found the gist of the Third Com- 
mandment to be, that a man should make true 
whatever he said when he called upon the 
name of the Lord. In that case there was a 
demand for truthfulness resting on divine con- 
siderations. A\ hen we come to the Ninth 
Commandment we find a demand for truth- 
fulness resting on human considerations, 

The case stands thus in the commandments : 
God loves truth and will tolerate nothing else 
in his presence, and man has a right to it. 

There is something of juridical cast doubtless 
about both these commandments : L e,, they 
refer primarily to special applications of the 
principle of truthfulness. They do not attempt 
to enclose the whole principle and provide for 
its universal application; they rather say that 
there are certain specified instances from which 

185 



186 



THE TEX WORDS 



it shall never be absent. "We found that to be 
evident enough as we worked out our line of 
thought on the Third Commandment, and the 
"fulfilment" of it in the Saviour's hands. 

Doubtless this Ninth Commandment had 
prime reference to the ground which Ave con- 
ceive to be covered among ourselves, when we 
speak of the crime of perjury. The extent of 
its intent reached probably no further than 
judicial proceedings. AVe argue this from the 
circumstances of the case, and not from any 
necessary restriction in the language itself. 

Moses was primarily a lawgiver rather 
than a moral reformer or spiritual teacher. 
He looked rather to the foundations on which 
a civilization could rest than to those on which 
an alert conscience could find peace. "We may 
fairly judge that, as a lawgiver, Moses, in this 
Xinth Commandment, was a pioneer along a 
line in which all civilized nations have been 
compelled to follow in their enactments against 
the crime of perjury. Eevive the historic set- 
ting and you will see the probable, primal 
field of application of the commandments. 

In the days of nomadism two men had a 
dispute about the ownership of stock. The 
elders of the clan or tribe sat in front of the 
tent of the most distinguished or venerable 
man among them, about the going down of the 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 



187 



sun, to hear, try and determine the matter in 
dispute. It is plain to be seen that there can 
be no possibility of making headway in the 
case if the persons who testify do not tell the 
truth. There is an end to the possibility of 
justice, and then of civilization, if the judges 
cannot get at the facts of the case. The guide 
to the facts must largely be in the testimony 
of the parties. Now a commandment that a 
man should not bear false witness against his 
neighbor, coming to the people with all the 
force and solemnity of a divine institution, 
was putting them all under oath beforehand 
to tell the truth in any - case that might 
arise. There were not a great many com- 
mandments ; not so many but that the simplest- 
minded and even all the young children, as 
we ourselves well know, could carry them in 
memory. When the statements were made 
before the elder judges, there sprang up in 
every man's consciousness the awful words: 
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy 
neighbor, as plainly as if he were listening to 
the utterance of the thunderings of Jehovah 
from Mount Sinai. 

Admit now that Moses in this command- 
ment was legal and not spiritual, can we not 
say that from his point of view, as a law- 
giver, he was right in being legal and not 



188 



THE TEN WOEDS 



spiritual? It is a large realm that we cover 
by our sense of the spiritual demands of truth. 
But it is only a small part of that realm, viola- 
tion of which becomes, with us, a subject of 
legal prosecution. We have law against libel 
and slander. But it is not every untruth 
which we tell about our neighbor that subjects 
us to prosecution under that law. It is only 
w T hen a substantial injury from our speech to 
the standing or character of another in so- 
ciety results, or is plainly probable, that we 
become punishable, and not even then, unless 
an evil intent on our part is manifest or easily 
inferable. So we have our statutes against 
perjury. 

But it is not everything that is said on the 
witness stand the known falsity of which 
would subject us to the pains and penalties of 
perjury. It is only intentional falsity on a 
point mat^ial to the case in hand that makes 
us liable to punishment. "We are not omnis- 
cient with our senses, and the law passes over 
all mistakes and errors in testimony in court. 
It puts its punishment only upon falsehood on 
the point in issue ; and there, because it pre- 
sumes that attention is called so strictly to that 
point that a witness must know the force of 
his testimony — must know r whether he is true 
or false. If it be said, then, that Moses in his 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 189 

law did not cover the whole ground of truth 
this is also to be said : neither do we in ours. 

But this may be said, both with regard to 
Moses and ourselves, that, if there is insistence 
on truthfulness on the most solemn occasions 
— those that are vital to the health and the 
weal of society — that is testimony enough to 
the estimate of man of the radical value of 
truthfulness and its rank among virtues. A 
statute can but partly cover a principle. 

Now spring up the questions, What is the 
principle? Whence came it? Whereto does 
it lead ? Perhaps anj r thing having tendency 
to answer any one of these questions, would 
give light on the explication of the others. 
What is truthfulness ? I da not know that I 
can do any better than to direct each one to 
an inspection of his own moral consciousness 
for answer. If we say that some things are 
easier felt than described we are not thereby 
taking refuge in obscurity but referring the 
matter to the highest tribunal o: P he being, to 
the one where there is the least liability to mis- 
take, where things lie truest to their own na- 
ture and nearest to our comprehension, and 
where we are surest that all see alike. Diffi- 
cult as truthfulness may be to define, we all 
feel it out, and I have no doubt we all feel the 
same thing. Great realms are difficult of defi- 



190 



THE TEX WORDS 



nition; so are those that are closest to the 
soul. But for a skeleton definition how would 
something like this do ? — Conscious intent to 
represent facts as they are. That perhaps 
might be called a working definition. Now 
we may ask whence came such a principle. 

There can be no answer to that except by 
reference to that dim old time when moral 
capacity came in upon the nature of man, and 
to its succeeding development. , Command- 
ments do not come to people who know not 
their meaning. Before the commandments 
were inscribed on the tables at Sinai, the com- 
mandment for truthfulness had been inscribed 
on the human heart from a time whereof the 
memory .of man ran not to the contrary. The 
moral principle was deeply imbedded in the 
human soul, and the commandment came to 
enforce the moral principle. Anterior to Sinai, 
wherever men had gathered before eiders in- 
vested with the functions of magistracy, they 
had known that it was wrong to bear false 
witness against a neighbor. What is the re- 
lation of this commandment to that primal 
revelation ? The commandment brought out 
in clearness that primal revelation and gave 
it theistic sanction — a process, which, we shall 
find, will be followed in all moral progress. 
We shall never have touched bottom in morals 



THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 191 

till we find every principle set in system and put 
under the charge of the Executive of righteous- 
ness. 

We put men under adjuration now when 
they come into court to give testimony. That 
has been done wherever men have had civili- 
zation and religion. Thus there has been a 
recognition of the fact that morals belong to 
the kingdom of God. "We reinforce the order 
in which the subject of truthfulness is ap- 
proached in the ten commandments every time 
we swear a witness in the courts. " Thou shalt 
not take the name of the Lord thy God in 
vain " is the expression of the moral meaning 
of every oath administered. Back of the com- 
mand you put upon a witness not to bear false 
witness against his neighbor lies the expecta- 
tion that in his soul there is a conviction that 
truth is something " The Everlasting hath fixed 
in his canon," and that He is not to be trifled 
with. 

We have there the best summary of the 
origin and aim of the moral function of man's 
nature that philosophy can give. That func- 
tion is no convention — arose out of no conven- 
tion of man. As Carlyle would say, the moral 
nisus which a man finds within him, strug- 
gling to lead him to truthfulness, is not some- 
thing which the man has, it is something which 



192 



TEE TEX WORDS 



has -him. Untrue to that nisus. he finds within 
himself " a certain fearful looking for of judg- 
ment and fiery indignation," which neither 
himself, nor society about liini, nor society be- 
fore him originated. He has something more 
than himself or society or the totality of human 
history against him. The whole universe with 
its God is his opponent. It is said that a liar 
needs a long memory. He needs more than 
that, he needs a new universe of which he 
himself must become the executive. I do not 
see how there can be any analysis of the work- 
ing of a human soul before the moral principle 
of holiness, or under the consciousness of its 
violation, that does not find rest in theism. 
Lay down any other basis for morals and 
" The bed is shorter than that a man can 
stretch himself on it : and the covering nar- 
rower than that he can wrap himself in it." 
3Ir. IVTartineau has something that will bear 
on the } pint at which we have arrived. Let 
me quot l ^om him : 

Beyuxxd our obligation to do each other no 
mischief, beyond the claims of reciprocal affec- 
tion, unveracity touches other relations not so 
much within as beyond our life. Whoever 
commits a breach of veracity belies two things : 
primarily his own beliefs and feelings ; but also 
the beliefs and feelings that are authorized by 



THE NINTH C03MAXD3IEXT 



193 



reality as accordant with the nature of tilings 
and the course of the world. . . . 

"Besides the agreement between thoughts 
and words there is the agreement between 
thoughts and things ; and into this relation 
the falsifier has broken with spoiling and 
burglarious hands ; he has tampered with the 
order of facts which God has made true; Jie 
wants us to think of them not as they are, but 
as it suits him that we should imagine. He 
declines to accept the consequences of truth, 
and quarrels with the realized order of the 
world, as soon as he is hard pressed by it and 
it threatens to baffle his designs ; so he rebels 
against it and takes to the crooked ways of 
his own cunning. This I conceive is the ele- 
ment other and more than simply social which 
is felt to be involved in every lie, and which 
makes it not only a human delinquency but 
an impiety — a bold affront against the seat of 
all truth, the source and center of al beauty 
and goodness. The exclamation of t] postle 
Peter, " Thou hast not lied unto men, but 
unto God," holds good of every lie ; and it is 
the secret consciousness of this which mingles 
a certain religious shrinking with the shame 
and repugnance of all purposed falsehood. 
Veracity therefore wields the authority, not 
of social affection only, but of reverence also, 

13 



194 



THE TEX WORDS 



supported by the kindred sentiments that draw 
us to all intellectual light and spiritual beauty. 
Even in men without distinct theological be- 
lief the high-minded rectitude which scorns 
pretence and loves a pure sincerity has not, I 
am persuaded, its foundation in the social be- 
nevolences, but is equivalent to an unconscious 
religion, a homage paid to a perfection that 
has rightful hold of the universe, and is the 
inward reality of all appearance. In its ex- 
plicit form this image of Moral Eight no 
longer represents itself as a collective con- 
science of mankind, or as an abstract law and 
order, but lives in the will and personality of 
God. "Were veracity commanded to men only 
by social affection and pressure of opinion, it 
would rest within the limits of human rela- 
tions and cast no look beyond. Yet in all 
ages and nations it has sought the temples for 
shelter and ratified the contracts of the market 
by prayer at the shrine ; and under the form 
of vows and oaths betrayed the consciousness 
that other eyes than those of human kind kept 
watch over simplicity of word and purity of 
truth. The superstitions which have clustered 
around such usages, and perverted their mean- 
ing and operation, may demand their revision 
or their removal from some particular applica- 
tions, but cannot cancel their testimony to the 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 195 



psychological origin of the estimate of veracity 
in something more than the social relations." 1 
The evolution of morals contemplates their 
spiritualization — the truth, that command- 
ments enjoined for courts or occasions of state, 
is to come in on all life. That end has not 
yet been accomplished. We still need the 
commandment, " Thou shalt not bear false 
witness against thy neighbor," with all its 
spiritual implications. The spirit of truth in 
its nisits toward perfection still finds in us 
refractory, unresponsive material. A sentence 
of Tennyson in the Princess puts before us a 
realm where we fail to realize truth's ideal. 

" Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed. 
Drink deep until the habits of the slave, 
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite 
And slander, die." 

Those sins of emptiness, gossip and spite and 
slander, are still rife. And by those sins the 
world is still filled with false witness of neigh- 
bor against neighbor. 

In our social interviews I do not know but 
we should feel that life had lost its piquancy 
if we could not hear or tell something that 
was not quite the truth about our neighbor. 
There is a charm to exaggeration of our neigh- 

1 Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. ii., pp. 258-9, Second Ed., Rev. 



196 



THE TEX WORDS 



bor's faults. There is a pleasure in a little 
spiteful turn to the brush in a portraiture so 
that it shall look unattractive or bizarre or 
ludicrous. But such charms and pleasures be- 
token low moral conditions. Tennyson is 
right when he puts " the sins of emptiness, 
gossip and spite and slander." as the outcome 
of the life of slaves. They belong in that 
stage of the evolution of society and of moral 
perception in man. They are charged full of 
false witness. The satire runs : 

11 Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, 
And without sneering teach the rest to sneer ; 
Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, 
Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike." 

— Pope, Prologue to the Satires, 

The lamentable thing is that that is sober 
history of so much that finds place in society 
life. Notice how often you will hear the 
most conclusive judgments rendered on a basis 
that you will see on the slightest examination 
is entitled to no respect. " He looks just like 
so and so. and I never could bear him." I 
heard him once, and that is enough." "I met 
her at my neighbor's. She has no heart, is 
cold, distant, haughty."' This, and all its kin, 
is probably false witness. It is probably no 
fair characterization of the person under view. 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 



197 



Its sin is in being willing to load down with 
our prejudices people about whom we can 
know but little. Come back to self a moment 
and try the case. How kaleidoscopic we are 
in our phenomena ! Different facets of our 
character come up to view according to differ- 
ent conditions, and the conditions are ever on 
the move. The same expression is rarely or 
never repeated. One person meets us in a 
moment of gaiety, and to that person we are 
always, thenceforth, light and frivolous. An- 
other meets us in a somber mood, and to him 
we are forevermore stupid and morose. A 
mother, flustered with her household cares and 
anxiety for a sick child, is summoned to the 
parlor to meet the friend of a friend, and 
those few moments close the mother's case for- 
ever. We are creatures of moods, and the 
charm of life is that we are, that we can flit 

" From grave to gay, from lively to severe," 

but two mismatched moods, unless the Ninth 
Commandment hover over them, are likely to 
pass into permanent misrepresentation. The 
Danish psychologist Hoffding says : " A per- 
sonality is never fully given in any single mo- 
ment, or in any single situation ; it is to be 
had as a whole in the sum total of its life, of 
its history." 



198 



THE TEN WORDS 



Is not this the rule of a great deal of prac- 
tice — perhaps of our practice — the slighter the 
contact the readier the witness? What can 
such witness be but false witness ! 

It is an end in view in morals that every 
human being shall go out of our presence and 
be forever uninjured by misrepresentation 
from us. We shall be a long way on the road 
to complete moral redemption when " the sins 
of emptiness, gossip and spite and slander," in 
us are dead. Our right to a reputation cor- 
responding to the totality of the facts of our 
case is one of the dearest and most sacred of 
our properties. 

" Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, 
Is the immediate jewel of their souls; 
Who steals my purse steals trash ; 'tis something, nothing ; 
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands. 
But he who filches from me my good name 
Robs me of that which not enriches him 
And makes me poor indeed." 

—Othello. 

The wrongs upon which I have commented 
may be considered the sins of thoughtlessness. 
But they are no less sins, for anybody above 
the rank of slaves ; and even slaves them- 
selves have no right to be thoughtless. 

" Evil is wrought by want of thought, 
As well as want of heart." 

—Hood, Lady's Dream. 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 199 



But there are realms where even the excuse 
of thoughtlessness cannot cover our falsehood ; 
for much, if not the most of it, is deliberate. 
Lord Salisbury says we must not count too 
much on human progress. Take American 
politics, and from the foundation of the nation 
there has been an amount of deliberate lying in 
it which would make fair prima facie evidence 
that the American people had never heard of 
the commandment ; " Thou shalt not bear false 
witness against thy neighbor." Assassins of 
physical life have not been popular, but assas = 
sins of reputation have been. The man who 
could do the most injury to the leaders of the 
opposite party, who could make misrepresenta- 
tion and misconstruction tell in the votes of the 
people, has had the willing ear, if not of the 
people, yet of his party. It is depressing to see 
how barbarous we have been in our politics and 
what little sign of civilization and morality we 
see in it now. We think the poisoned arrows 
of the Congo forest indications of wretched, 
hateful savagery. But in our politics we send 
poisoned arrows into human spirits and rejoice 
in their rankling. Detraction and misrepre- 
sentation have been licensed crimes. They 
pursued Washington. That they had no basis 
is proved by the fact that they have fallen by 
the way in history. They have gone the way 



200 



THE TEN WORDS 



of all lies, into nothingness and outer darkness. 
There is one instance, within the memory of 
men still living, so plain that " wayfaring men, 
though fools " could not err in respect to it. 

After Abraham Lincoln was nominated for 
the presidency and during the war what char- 
acterization did we get of him ? He was a 
baboon. That was the representation of his 
person. Now Mr. Lincoln was of pleasing mien, 
easy in manner and a gentleman in behavior. 
So he is going into history because such is the 
truth. Then he was described as a careless, 
heartless story-teller who cared nothing for the 
woes of the war. Now Mr. Lincoln is going 
into history as a sensitive, loving soul, burdened 
with sorrow for every wound inflicted in bat- 
tle, and for all the griefs of homes, South as 
well as North. The sound of the pistol shot 
by which he died was still echoing when the 
words were uttered which showed how reck- 
lessly and fearfully he had been belied. " Sic 
semper tyrannis." Abraham Lincoln a tyrant ! 
Think of it ! If ever a man was gifted with a 
democratic soul it was Abraham Lincoln. Yet 
half the nation came to believe that he was a 
tj^rant. How was that result brought about ? 
By magnificent lying ! But that lying will 
not make history. It will not be known there 
except as lying. 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 201 

If one would know the proximate cause of 
the civil war he will find it to be violation of 
the Ninth Commandment. The process of 
firing the southern heart to secede from the 
Union and take up the gage of battle was a 
process of misrepresentation of the attitude 
and intents of the people who had elected Mr. 
Lincoln to the presidency. The temperate, 
kindly attitude of the people of the North will 
go into history as fact and the false witness as 
false witness. But what death and destruc- 
tion that false witness wrought ! 

There are some interesting questions in 
casuistry respecting our obligation to tell the 
truth in certain peculiar circumstances. There 
are persons who have no right to the knowl- 
edge of certain facts — what shall we do when 
questioned by such persons ? I think there 
will be found less trouble in dealing with such 
cases in practice than in theory. "A still 
tongue makes a wise head." Practically if we 
do not want an intermeddler to worm any- 
thing out of us he should find that he could 
not. Cases of this sort, I am persuaded, look 
more irresolvable on paper than they are in 
actual life. More secrets have been let out by 
lying about them than in any other way. So 
we will dismiss this feature of casuistry with 
the remark that we usually find a way to cross 



202 



THE TEN WORDS 



a stream when we come to it. But casuistry 
raises the question, What may we not do 
with persons who would not know the truth, 
or its bearings, if it were told them, for in- 
stance, the insane ? I think here that science 
is uttering an unequivocal voice in favor of the 
truth. The trouble with an insane man is that 
he has lost his bearing in the world of facts. 
He confounds illusion with reality. Now the 
alienists say that where a man is wavering be- 
tween the illusory and the real there is noth- 
ing so helpful to him as the confidence it is 
possible to develop in him, of the trustworthi- 
ness of those in whose charge his life is put. 
As he wavers between fact and fancy, if he 
finds solid ground in what his physician or at- 
tendant tells him is solid ground, he will be 
more ready to practice under their direction, 
and so more readily overcome his delusion and 
recover sanity. But if he finds fraud and de- 
ceit in his guide then delusion is reinforced. 
If we want a child to get firm and correct 
footing in this system of things, we must tell 
him the truth. We have the same problem 
with the insane that we have with a child, 
only, whereas the mind of the child is largely 
vacant, that of the insane is occupied, possessed 
by fictions. All truth helps such person back 
to facts as it does the child forward. So 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 203 

science makes imperative the claim of the in- 
sane to truth. 

Theoretically it seems easy to justify de- 
partures from truth, but practically should we 
find the departures from truth sit easily in our 
moral natures? On this point I must quote 
from Mr. Martineau : 

"Yet after all there is something in this 
problem which refuses to be thus laid to rest ; 
and in treating it, it is hardly possible to es- 
cape the uneasiness of a certain moral inconse- 
quence. If we consult the casuist of Common- 
sense, he usually tells us that in theory veracity 
can have no exceptions ; but that in practice 
he is brought face to face with at least a few ; 
and he cheerfully accepts a dispensation when 
required at the hands of Necessity. I confess 
rather to an inverse experience. The theoretic 
reasons for certain limits to the rule of verac- 
ity appear to me unanswerable ; nor can I con- 
demn any one who acts in accordance with 
them. Yet when I place myself in a like posi- 
tion, at one of the crises demanding a deliber- 
ate lie, an unutterable repugnance returns upon 
me and makes the theory seem shameful. If 
brought to the test I should probably act 
rather as I think than as I feel, without, how- 
ever, being able to escape the stab of an in- 
stant compunction and the secret wound of a 



204 



THE TEX WORDS 



long humiliation. Is this the mere weakness 
of superstition ? It may be so. But may it 
not also spring from an ineradicable sense of 
common humanity, still leaving social ties to 
even social aliens, and in the presence of an 
imperishable fraternal unity, forbidding to the 
individual of the moment the proud right of 
spiritual ostracism? Is it permissible to feel 
that outlawry, though a political necessity, is 
not an institution of the divine commonwealth, 
at the disposal of every citizen in the kingdom 
of heaven ? How could I ever face the soul I 
had deceived, when perhaps our relations are 
reversed, and he meets my sins, not with self- 
protective repulse, but with winning love ? 
And if with thoughts like these there also 
blends that inward reverence for reality which 
clings to the very essence of the human rea- 
son and renders it incredible, a priori, that 
falsehood should become an implement of 
good, it is perhaps intelligible how there may 
be an irremediable discrepancy between the 
dioptric certainty of the understanding and 
the immediate insight of the conscience ; not 
all the rays of spiritual truth are refrangible : 
some then are beyond the intellectual spectrum 
that wake invisible response and tremble in 
the dark " {Types of Eih ical Theory, pp. :2GIf—5^ 
Second Ed., Rev.). 



THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 



205 



We may more than suspect that there can 
be no white lies. Soot will brush from any 
lie on the soul. "Wherefore, putting away 
falsehood, speak ye truth each one with" and 
about "his neighbor." 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



Vice boasts its elements, like other arts : 
These he inculcates first ; anon imparts 
The petty tricks of saving ; last inspires, 
Of endless wealth, the insatiable desires. 

# # * 

Wealth, by such dangers earned, such anxious 
pain, 

Eequires more care to keep it, than to gain : 
Whate'er my miseries, make me not, kind 
Fate, 

The sleepless Argus of a vast estate ! 

—Juvenal, Satire xiv.^ Gifford, Tr. 



208 



THE TENTH 



COMMANDMENT 



" Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not 
covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maid- 
servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neigh- 
bor's." — Ex, 20: 17; Deut. 5: 21. 

We have treated the commandments as 
germs, and so think we can rationally meet all 
the objections that may be raised against their 
divine origin on the ground of the obvious 
limitations of some of them to a narrow field 
of view, when it seems, certainly to us, that 
there was a larger domain possible to be cov- 
ered. We have allowed the stamp of Matthew 
Arnold's " Zeitgeist " to be upon them. Partial 
in application as these commandments seem 
to be, when the whole domain of morals is 
taken into view, we yet find this to be true, 
that no one of them is stated as if it were the 
last revelation possible on the line on which 
the commandment appeared. The command- 
ment is a hand on the guide-board pointing a 
way, but it is not a description of the totality 
of experience that might be found on that 
way. The commandments seem in some cases 
to be merely bars to coarse crimes and vices. 

14 209 



210 THE TEX WORDS 

But even so they do not prevent the acquisi- 
tion of finer sensibilities and more perfect ad- 
justments beyond the crude sins reprobated 
and the embryonic virtues indicated. Given 
evolution as the general theory by which we 
must work in our philosophy and science of 
morals, as elsewhere, the phenomenon of lim- 
ited commandments in a larger possible moral 
domain is explicable. TTe should expect the 
development to be as it has been. 

But we need to be careful when we take this 
position that we do not make these command- 
ments more limited and partial than they are. 
The commandment, " Thou shalt do no mur- 
der," does not go a great way on the road which 
runs over the ground of the possible moral ad- 
justment of man to man. So the command- 
ment, " Thou shalt not steal," is certainly very 
far short of what we conceive to be correct 
moral adjustment with each other over the 
property realm. But what has happened we 
may look upon as likely to have happened. 
TThoever received the commandments would 
be likely to find out that they were but speci- 
mens in larger principles, and there would in 
normal moral development grow up an attempt 
to grasp the principles. It is only necessary to 
read the prophet Isaiah to see how an alert 
moral nature would workout beyond the spec- 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 211 

ification, " Thou shalt not steal," into the 
principle that the last legal rights should not 
be enforced against the unfortunate — the fath- 
erless and the widow. The process of " ful- 
filling " the commandments was evidently go- 
ing on before the Saviour took hold of them. 

But the moral range of these commandments 
on their face was not the same. Some ran 
farther out into the realm of spirituality, i. e. 9 
toward the utmost stretch and compass of a 
moral ideal, than others. The Tenth Com- 
mandment is a clear example of this spiritual 
sort — perhaps the clearest. The second table 
of the law seems largely a regulation of the 
conduct of man toward man in reference to the 
subjects treated. But this Tenth Command- 
ment is a regulation in man. It goes beyond 
specified outward acts and deals with the spirit 
in its inward conditions. It is an attempt not 
to regulate society but to regulate man. It is 
an anticipatory application, in one realm, of 
the Saviour's principle that there must be a 
pure fountain within. 

It seems strange to meet a commandment 
like this, so spiritual in its cast, coming out of 
its time and circumstances. AYe should hardly 
expect a product of this perfected spiritual 
kind from the inchoate morals and civilization 
of a primitive people. But the moral nature 



212 THE TEN WORDS 

of man is very old. However confused man 
may have been in his application of moral 
principles, we can trace his recognition of them 
far back in history. I think we have a very 
conclusive answer in this commandment to the 
question, whether man's moral nature is made 
up for him out of social control. Here is a 
commandment that runs to the " thoughts and 
intents of the heart," where no social control 
can acquire standing. Indeed, it is a realm in 
regard to the condition of which societ}^ can 
have no knowledge and hence no reason for 
attempted regulation. The commandments, 
" Thou shalt not kill," and " Thou shalt not 
steal," might have grown up out of social reg- 
ulation. But it is difficult to see how society, 
as simple matter of protection to itself, could 
have elaborated the commandment, "Thou 
shalt not covet." In doing it it was going be- 
hind any ov^rt acts which it discerned to be 
injurious to the common weal. Social control 
could only go to such acts for its self -protec- 
tion. If it went behind them into the spirit of 
man, it was because it perceived already there 
a recognition of a spiritual principle that was 
better for its weal than all its possible regula- 
tions of acts. 

That sends us back to the inquiry, How 
came such principle there in the heart of man ? 



TEE TEXTE COMMANDMENT 213 



TTbo instituted it ? 'What is its meaning ? 
Gociety could not make out of its controls tke 
very principle it was using in its controls. It 
was tkere for use or it could not kave been ap- 
pealed to. Tke fact is, men did not make tke 
moral nature of man. They found it made and 
hence they could use it. Society never made a 
spiritual principle. Finding a spiritual princi- 
ple within themselves, men, in their develop- 
ment, could see kere and tkere how new appli- 
cations of principles might be made. Tins 
Tentk Commandment is a witness to tke di- 
vineness of human nature and of a divine at- 
tempt to guide it to divine ends. It seems to 
be a clear case of tke passing up of morals into 
religion. Back of anything that came out of 
society to man was a divine control of tke hu- 
man spirit toward man. It is out of that con- 
trol that tke voice comes to men, " Thou shalt 
not covet. " Tke voice of moral regulation in 
tke soul of man is tke voice of God. To write 
thus on tables of stone, or to read therefrom, 
was only to start up to clear vision the lines in 
which, in "sympathetic ink," it had already 
been written in the human heart. 

There come to us in the form in which we 
have the commandment samples of the appli- 
cation of its principle. u Thou shalt not covet 
thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy 



214 



THE TEX WORDS 



neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his 
maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any- 
thing that is thy neighbor's." These specifi- 
cations come out of the suggestions of the 
time of their utterance. If Ave make applica- 
tion of the commandment in these days, sug- 
gestions will spring up from out our own cir- 
cumstances. Each man must make the appli- 
cation of the - commandment to himself, as he 
is called upon to regulate his spirit in the com- 
plex condition of social life in which he bears 
a part. 

The property idea seems to be the ruling 
idea of the day and the world. Under the 
commandment what form shall we give to the 
expression of this idea ? We have evidently 
ability to acquire property, and evidently also 
moral rights to property. But is it not also 
clear that there are moral limitations to the 
use of this ability and also moral limitations 
to our rights to property ? What are the limi- 
tations to our rights to accumulation ? Would 
not a rule of the following sort stand moral 
inspection? — We may acquire what we can give 
moral account of to God and rational account 
of to man. Let us try some concrete cases for 
illustration of our rule : 

A fortune of forty or fifty millions was ac- 
cumulated. But what to do with it after he 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



215 



got it, its possessor had no idea. He himself 
could think of no way in which to expend 
his money, in philanthropic effort, except by 
building a hotel for women ; and he had so 
little idea about how that should be managed 
that .he left everything pertaining to it for his 
executors to arrange. They knew so little 
about the problem they had on hand, that 
they opened the hotel only to those women 
who could pay six dollars a week for board. 
Now anybody, except a man who had charge 
of fifty millions of money, would know that 
women who can pay six dollars a week for 
board do not ask any man to build a hotel for 
their accommodation. They can find or keep 
one to suit themselves. There is no class in 
the community who need less looking after 
than women who can pay six dollars per week 
for board. They can glide into society, and 
settle themselves in respectable conditions, 
with less friction, less difficulty, and less 
danger to themselves than any other class 
of persons. 

The hotel was opened with much flourish of 
trumpets ; and no boarders, or next to none, 
The project was public derision. The execu- 
tors quietly covered the ostentatious nonsense 
by opening the building as a hotel for the 
public in general. Thus ended this man's one 



216 



THE TEN WORDS 



effort to pass, posthumously, into the class of 
philanthropists. He had so little knowledge 
of, so little interest in, and so little sympathy 
with, all other objects and causes of philan- 
thropic nature that he designated no one as 
recipient of a legacy from his estate, but 
bowed himself out of the presence of them 
all, leaving his wife to entertain them as she 
might. A most lame and impotent conclu- 
sion for a sublime opportunity. The tend- 
ency of large estates to disintegration and 
comminution is well illustrated in the case 
to which allusion is made. This estate, which 
a generation ago was one of the largest in the 
country, has been declared bankrupt, i. <?., it 
was all dissipated and more, too. If we stud- 
ied the matter closely, we should find that the 
parallelism between the disintegration of great 
fortunes and their accumulation is more evenly 
held than we commonly think. The two proc- 
esses go on side by side, nearly equal. 

When you search for the intellectual and 
moral assets of many a successful business man, 
often you can find only that he exhibited an 
abnormal, monstrously excrescent growth of 
the faculty of acquisition. He was weak every- 
where else. In fact he made himself weak in 
every other faculty that he might be strong 
in that. Possibly he kept himself inside the 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 217 

forms of law in the accumulation of his prop- 
erty. But it must be remembered that laws 
are made for the lawless, and, so far as they 
are restrictive, only indicate boundaries be- 
yond which actions are intolerable to society. 
The Christian religion and Christian morals 
have a higher law than the coarse, crude re- 
strictions which society has put about commer- 
cial affairs in statutory and in common law. 
Society by law has expressed an opinion on 
only a few things. There is a vast number 
of matters that are relegated to the individual 
to pass upon, in the light of morals, under a 
sense of responsibility before the all-seeing 
and the all-exacting Judge of morals. 

An individual will find that he has not done 
with morals when he has done with the law. 
The law says : " Thou shalt not kill." Morals 
say : " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- 
self." Turning the light of morals upon many 
a career and its outcome, we lay down the 
proposition that those who pursued them had 
no right to acquire the property they accumu- 
lated unless they knew, better than they 
seemed to, what to do with it. That they had 
great powers of organization in business was 
no excuse at all for their using those powers 
unless they had in view in their use some defi- 
nite end which would stand moral scrutiny. 



218 



THE TEX WORDS 



The mere accumulation of property will not 
stand such scrutiny. The purposelessness of 
that kind of action condemns it in morals. 
Ethics rule out matters of no intent as well as 
matters of bad intent. 

The accumulation of property by the means 
very commonly employed cannot stand moral 
examination. The grand purpose of business 
activity seems to be to crush out all competi- 
tors and consolidate all business in concerns 
of mammoth size subject to one ownership and 
direction, Xow if men cannot give a satis- 
factory account of the end in view in building 
up their immense consolidated establishments, 
then thev have no right to interfere with 
trade as it is carried on by their neighbors. 
If a business profit amounting to fifty millions 
is left to be divided among a thousand men, 
humanity will be likely to take more by that 
method of disposing of the fifty millions than 
it is now. "Whoever gets into his own hands 
what a thousand men might have, ought to 
show that the amount thus consolidated would 
serve a better purpose than it would if widely 
distributed. 

One can crush out a rival in business legally. 
But that does not end the matter. He must 
run the gauntlet of morals yet. He must take 
into account the desirability that some one 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 219 



else should make a living as well as himself ; 
the probability that some one else will know 
what to do with the profits of business as well 
as himself, and a multitude of other sugges- 
tions which his moral nature will present to 
his consideration. Because a man has talents 
that is no reason why he should exercise them. 
Ghenois Khan and Tamerlane had an excel- 
lent talent for combining men in armies so as 
to crush out all opposing nations and consoli- 
date all government in their hands ; but they 
w r ere the scourges of mankind. Now certain 
men exhibit the same genius for combinations 
in commerce w r hich Ghengis Khan and Tamer- 
lane did in war, and with the same barbaric 
conclusions. As the latter subjugated king- 
doms which neither they nor any of their suc- 
cessors knew how to rule, so these men heap 
together gigantic fortunes without a meaning. 
These demonstrations, however legal they may 
be, are immoral in many aspects. 

Take the fortunes that have been accumu- 
lated in the construction of railways and see 
how they will stand in the forum of morals. 
To begin with, their accumulation at all is more 
than questionable. The railways are founded 
on a public necessity and exist by a public use. 
It was towering selfishness that made them 
private property. De Witt Clinton left the 



220 



THE TEN WORDS 



Erie canal to be the property of the state of 
~New York. There is not a railway or system 
of railways in the land that represents the 
genius or the energy that projected and com- 
pleted the Erie canal. Both have their reason 
of being and their being, in a public use, yet 
the one belongs to the people and the other to 
private individuals. The balance of ethical 
considerations is decidedly in favor of the 
course pursued by Mr. Clinton. Public fame 
can scarce be in error when it asserts that 
along the line by which the great fortunes 
have been accumulated there has been wrong, 
sometimes masked, but often open and un- 
blushing. Legislatures have been cajoled or 
bribed. Stocks founded in fiction and fraud 
have been issued, to continue as excuse for 
heavy taxation on transit. The conversion of 
the public use to private emolument can 
scarcely bear ethical examination ; the means 
by which this was accomplished, over the 
larger realm of action, cannot bear such ex- 
amination at all. The inspiration and the end 
in view of all this wrong was simply covetous- 
ness. It is in vain to say that the railway 
system as we have it to-day is a necessity to 
enterprise. The case of De Witt Clinton is 
denial of that sufficiently absolute. 

But now we will go back to our former in- 



TEE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



221 



quiry and ask if the disposition which the own- 
ers of the great fortunes, made from railway 
and stock operations, have from time to time 
made of them will justify their accumulation. 
Over and over again we have had the demon- 
stration of utter helplessness beneath them. 
" An elephant on his hands," or " a bear by 
the ears," is just what fits the case. What to 
do with his fortune lias puzzled many a mil- 
lionaire more than the process of its accumula- 
tion. The courts have many times unearthed 
the fact that so mindless and purposeless was 
the owner of vast acquisitions respecting the 
use to be made of them, that he sought for 
advice to wizards that " peep and mutter," and 
to old crones that " squeak and gibber " pre- 
tentiously as from ghost-land. That on the 
face of it was confession that the man could 
not find justification for the position he was in 
as owner of great possessions. To come to 
such a pass, if it does not show intellectual, 
does show utter moral helplessness — the sec- 
ond and third childhood of the moral nature. 
When a man comes to dispose of his property 
he ought to show that he had some idea of 
what he was about when he was accumulating 
it. The operations of the stock market are 
supposed to exhibit great shrewdness, and that 
is thought to be a high intellectual quality. 



222 



THE TEN WORDS 



But how high is it ? How much above the 
qualities shown by an Indian or a hunter in 
pursuit of game ? Are feints in the market of 
any higher rank than feints in the thicket ? 
Is it a very exalted intellectual operation for 
a man to sell when he wants to buy and buy 
when he wants to sell ? And then is it a 
transaction shining clear in the realm of mor- 
als ? Men are said to be " gamy " on the stock 
exchange. But is it not going a great way 
back in evolution to pick up a term that de- 
scribes the actions of animals, to lay down over 
the processes of man ? Bulls and bears ! 

" 'Tis true, 'tis pity ; 
And pity 'tis, 'tis true." 

Many a man has had his ambition to be a 
leader in the stock market and has succeeded 
in it. But what he has done with his success 
shows that there was no more moral signifi- 
cance to his life than there was to that of the 
buffalo bull that led his herd. Both led their 
herds because they could. One ate grass and 
the other made money, and both gored their 
competitors. Over the action of men, because 
they were men, hung the commandment, 
" Thou shalt not covet." 

In another light we can see what little right 
many men have to their fortunes. They have 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 223 



been in no sense producers. They added 
nothing to the wealth of mankind. If they 
had never lived, the same amount of property 
would have been in existence ; only it would 
have had other, and, most probably, wider dis- 
tribution. Theirs were simply powers of ac- 
cumulation out of others' possessions. They 
invented nothing, made no two blades of grass 
grow where one grew before. Their career 
was essentially parasitic ; they sucked profits 
from other people's necessities. Had these 
great and unwieldy aggregations remained 
distributed among the people from whom they 
were collected, the ends of morals would have 
been better satisfied, and certain darkly por- 
tentous clouds now resting on the social hori- 
zon would not have gathered. The existence 
of so many of these large fortunes under the 
circumstances in which they have been col- 
lected is one of the most important of the ele- 
ments which go to make up the present social 
discontent. The ability which makes a mer- 
chant king might have set up instead of crush- 
ing out a thousand traders. The ability 
which makes a railway king might have 
made freights and fares half the present 
rates throughout the nation. 

The accumulation of these large fortunes 
under the most favorable circumstances and 



224 



THE TEN WORDS 



with, apparently, the clearest moral sky, is a 
dangerous feat. George Peabody may be said 
to have justified his financial career in the 
court of morals by the educational bequests he 
made in this country. But his gifts in the 
shape of buildings for the London poor will no 
more than fairly excuse themselves for their 
accumulation. His buildings, indeed, found 
occupants. But they were but a drop in the 
bucket for the London poor. The wisdom of 
the form of the bequest is subject to challenge. 
Its chief value has undoubtedly been in call- 
ing attention to a proper type of tenement. 
A bequest for the benefit of landlords who 
would make proper repairs or construct tene- 
ments of a type designated might have been 
far more effective in blessing to the London 
poor. A man ought to cultivate his talent for 
distribution as well as for accumulation. In 
the progress of time we shall demand that a 
man show genius and insight in the former as 
well as in the latter ; that he be as good a 
prospector in the one as in the other. Some 
years ago a man died who had accumulated a 
fortune of several millions of dollars and had 
sixty illegitimate children. That he had no 
worthy end in view in accumulating his for- 
tune the latter fact would make certain. So- 
ciety is properly horrified at this licentious- 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



225 



ness. But his property represented as much 
moral wrong as his harem. They were both 
the outcome of unregulated instincts, — in- 
stincts gratified for their own sakes and noth- 
ing more. It is immoral to give unbridled 
rein to the property instinct just as to any 
other passion. 

Aristotle defined virtue as a mean between 
two extremes. Aristotle had thought long 
and well. While we should not want to as- 
sent to that definition as giving the essence of 
virtue, yet it is one of the best practical meas- 
ures of virtue ever given. You say that a 
man shall restrain the passion of wrath — even 
when there is occasion for just indignation, 
yet there is an extreme, inside of which it 
must be kept. The appetite or passion for 
food and drink is one to which we allow lati- 
tude, yet how quickly the individual and the 
public conscience settles down in condemnation 
of approach toward an extreme in eating and 
drinking. An inordinate eater loses caste irre- 
trievably; and the temperance cause repre- 
sents public sentiment toward unregulated pas- 
sion in drink. " When thou sittest to eat with 
a ruler . . . put a knife to thy throat, if 
thou be a man given to appetite," is the old 
Scripture proverb. Perhaps it is not so very 
singular that the next proverb is, " Weary not 

15 



226 



THE TEN WORDS 



to be rich." But the spirit of the proverb re- 
specting the appetite for food we have spread 
over all eating, not only as a dictate of man- 
ners, but of morals. But we look calmly on 
to see men glut the property passion and honor 
them by calling them great financiers. 

Some old Eoman emperor ate a peacock and 
drank a gallon of wine at a meal. He could 
not give any reason for such exercise of his 
appetite, except that eating and drinking were 
pleasurable to him. A man can sit in a little 
back office, a financial emperor, and make his 
thousands of dollars day after day, and no- 
body may be able to find a reason for his so 
doing, beyond the fact that it is pleasurable to 
him. The one is as unable to digest what his 
passion craved as the other ; the one as unable 
to utilize the forces of his fortune as the other 
the vital forces of his food. 

But it is right to accumulate property, is it 
not ? Yes, certainly. It is right to eat. But 
put your Aristotle to the one as you do to the 
other. Virtue is a mean between two ex- 
tremes. It is not right to starve one's self ; 
that is an ignoble surrender to the problem of 
life. It is not right to give one's self up to 
gluttony ; that is base. It is not right to set- 
tle down to contented or complaining poverty ; 
that is ignoble. It is not right to strain every 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



227 



faculty and opportunity just to be rich ; that is 
base. 

If there is need of further attempt to get 
proper bearings try a greater than Aristotle. 
In manuscript " D " it is said that " Jesus seeing 
a man at work on the sabbath day said to 
him : " If you know what you are about it is 
all right, but if you do not you are a sinner 
and a transgressor of the law." This is one of 
the things which criticism in its lynx-eyed 
search has brought forth out of the old dark 
past. If one will think a little upon it, I am 
sure he will say that criticism has paid for 
itself — paid for all the unrest it has caused — in 
the discovery of this precept. It can have 
had no other origin than that attributed to it 
by manuscript D. The principle is as deep as 
Aristotle's and somewhat plainer. We can 
take that principle and see our way by it to a 
correct regulation of the property instinct or 
any other. What we can give account for, 
what will stand to reason, not only ours but 
the universal reason — what will satisfy the 
better judgment of that only great society on 
earth, 

"The noble living and the noble dead" — 

what will stand the inquisition of the reason 
infinite and divine — if we know what we are 



228 



THE TEX WORDS 



about in such light, is all right : but if we 
do not, hell will find us and we it. as certainly 
over the route of an unregulated passion for 
property as over any other. 
* Paul tells the Colossians to kill covetousness. 
/ for it is idolatry. Idolatry with the apostles 
stood for the sum total of things against which 
Christianity set itself. The mainspring of many 
of the other crimes condemned by the deca- 
logue lies in this sin of covetousness. Theft is 
inexplicable except by covetousness. ilurder 
comes out of this property passion as often as 
from any other, and perhaps oftener. Go to 
the courts and see how often false witness 
against one's neighbor comes out of the un- 
hallowed thirst for something rightfully be- 
longing to another. Perjuries are piled upon 
perjuries to gratify covetousness. Forging is 
usually covetousness run out into insanity. 

There is no sin more persistent, of tougher 
grasp. Other passions men break, or their 
fires die out in them : but to the last we see 
men clutching for property on every hand, 
when it has long ceased to be possible for it to 
serve them, and when they have not the remot- 
est idea what can be done with it. AVho said 
it. or has it been said so long ago and by so 
many that it is a proverb : u Avarice is the vice 
of old age " ? It is the last passion to survive. 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 229 

Perhaps that is the reason why the command- 
ment to meet it is put last — on the principle 
that later suggestions hold the mind to the 
exclusion of the prior — as if when the man 
had reduced himself to reason here he might 
argue his redemption complete. Singular is 
that perversion of being which makes a man 
hold to the last to the one relationship which 
is most certainly to be forever sundered — his 
relationship to earthly property. We hope for 
renewal of other relationships in the world to 
come. If there they neither marry nor are 
given in marriage, we trust it is because 
spiritual relationships of higher order than can 
exist in the earthly relation are to be found. 
But there is not the faintest hope of continu- 
ation of our dominion, in the spirit-land, over 
what we heap together as property here. 

This subject ought to have interest to all as 
giving clearness s and tone respecting ideals of 
life. On a very large scale, it has special ap- 
plicability to our times. There is springing up 
among us a social and political power which 
we call communism. Jsow communism, as it 
makes itself heard, is often evidently only the 
growl of unsuccessful coyetousness. There is 
covetousness at the lower end of the social 
scale, property-wise considered. It has noth- 
ing. It wants all things, regardless of others' 



230 



THE TEN WORDS 



rights, and it means to have what it can get. 
It is unlovely, dangerous enough ; but against 
its projected and prospective robberies we 
have a somewhat firm moral sentiment, and 
we trust that this sentiment is in a powerful 
majority. 

But has communism no excuse ? Is its 
growl without occasion or reason ? At the 
other end of the scale we permit covetousness 
to run rampant, and we have no moral senti- 
ment against its exercise there, or at best one 
merely germinal. There our moral notions 
are only on the low level of the law, whereas 
they should be out of sight ahead of it. So 
long as society looks with favor upon such 
reasonless results, so long will it hear the 
growl of communism. Unregulated passion 
inside law at one end of the social scale will 
fire unregulated passion outside law at the 
other. That cannot be prevented. And there 
is a certain dark retributive sense in which it 
is right. 

These things cannot be reached by law. It 
is idle to form parties upon them, to attempt 
to regulate covetousness by legislation. But 
there is solution in the realm of morals. And to 
morals religion must address herself as to her 
birthright work. Religion, and religion only, 
can impart the health of heaven's inspirations. 



THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 



231 



I fear from tiie drift of this discussion that 
the impression may spring up that only mil- 
lionaires are likely to be subject to covetous- 
ness. It is a standard temptation along all 
life. A young girl is as likely to have her 
soul burned by envy over a new feather in the 
Sunday hat of a schoolmate as is a stock 
operator over the success of a rival on change. 
There is withering and blasting of finer feel- 
ings in the one case as in the other. It is not 
necessary to covet " the kingdoms of the earth 
and the glory of them" to be unhappy. 
Moral wretchedness and degradation come to 
every soul that harbors any form of covetous- 
ness. " But godliness with contentment is 
great gain." 



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